Vowel reduction

Under neutralization is understood in phonology the cancellation of a contrastive feature by a phonological process.

A good example is provided by voiced obstruents in word-final in German: The feature [ voiced ] of word- final consonants / d / in wheel is neutralized in this position, so that the voiceless obstruent is realized as [t ] ( devoicing ). The two utterances My advice and my bike are thus homophonic because the Stimmhaftigkeitskontrast was lifted.

The neutralization rule can be formulated as

C [ voiced ] → C [- voiced ] | _ #

In the broader sense, one can neutralize up rules on other linguistic levels of description.