Spectrographic evidence for uniformity of voicing in obstruent clusters

It is regarded as a near universal that obstruent clusters are, phonetically, of uniform voicing [Chomsky, N. and Halle, M., The Sound Pattern of English (Harper and Row, New York, 1968)], Nevertheless, there putatively exists a large class of counterexamples, in many languages, involving [v]. Thus, phonetic transcriptions uniformly show, e.g., German zwei “two” and Schwein “pig” as, respectively, [tsvai] and [švain]; Russian tvoy “your” and svoboda “freedom” as beginning with, respectively, [tv] and [sv]; English svelte as [svɛlt], etc. However, preliminary spectrographic results from English indicate that what has been transcribed as (voiced) [v] in such cases is, in fact, (voiceless) [f]: The labiodental fricative in question is no more voiced than, e.g., the [p] in spin. Results will be presented of a larger study in which native speakers of English, German, and Russian read randomized lists containing words from their languages with tautosyllabic clusters customarily transcribed as Obstruent‐[v]. [Work supported by NSF.]