"Voiced obstruent" mistakes

[Claire Bowern]

I'll delurk to give you an example or two from Australia. Yidiny is a
language that ends in a palatal nasal, but the number of times I've
heard it pronounced with three syllables, as [jidini] ...
We have similar issues with representing stops with voiced symbols in
Australia. Through a historical accident, most of the languages in the
west use the voiced series, while in the east they use the voiceless
ones (very few of the languages in this area have voicing contrasts).
When I was a grad student I remember someone talking to me at a
conference trying to claim that this reflected how they were
pronounced. It didn't make it into print that I know of though.
(There is variation in voicing in the languages without phonemic
oppositions, but it's not simple and doesn't have an east vs west
distribution.)
Claire