An EPG study of initial clusters in varying prosodic conditions

Lasse Bombien (1) , Christine Mooshammer (2) , Phil Hoole (1) , Barbara Kühnert (3) , Jennifer Schneeberg (2)

1 IPS - Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing
2 IPDS - Institute of Phonetics and Digital Signal Processing
3 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

Articulatory strengthening as a function of prosodic variation has so far been largely investigated for singleton consonants and vowels only. The aim of this study is to analyze effects of prosodic variation on the word intial cluster /kl/ by varying lexical word stress, accent and prosodic boundary levels. Therefore, three subjects were recorded by means of Electropalatography. Derived temporal parameters provide evidence corroborating the assumption that /k/ - which was closer to the boundary - was more affected by boundary strength than the more distal segment /l/, while /l/ tended to be stronger influenced by lexical stress than /k/. At lower prosodic boundaries, the consonants overlapped to a greater degree as compared to higher prosodic boundaries.

Keywords: electropalatography; consonant cluster; prosody; word stress; accent; articulatory strengthening; gestural overlap; German

Domains: Linguistics

Lasse Bombien, Christine Mooshammer, Phil Hoole, Barbara Kühnert, Jennifer Schneeberg. An EPG study of initial clusters in varying prosodic conditions. 7th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP), Dec 2006, Ubatuba, Brazil. pp. 35-42. ⟨halshs-00185742⟩