The Internal Structure of Word-Initial Consonant Clusters* 1

Journal of Child Language, 2005

Previous work on the acquisition of consonant clusters points to a tendency for word-final clusters to be acquired before word-initial clusters (Templin, 1957; Lleó & Prinz, 1996; Levelt, Schiller & Levelt, 2000). This paper evaluates possible structural, morphological, frequency-based, and articulatory explanations for this asymmetry using a picture identification task with 12 English-speaking two-year-olds. The results show that word-final stop+/s/ clusters and nasal+/z/ clusters were produced much more accurately than word-initial /s/+stop clusters and /s/+nasal clusters. Neither structural nor frequency factors are able to account for these findings. Further analysis of longitudinal spontaneous production data from 2 children aged 1;1–2;6 provides little support for the role of morphology in explaining these results. We argue that an articulatory account best explains the asymmetries in the production of word-initial and word-final clusters.

1984

Linguistic and behavioral evidence suggests that the syllable is composed of two major constituents, an onset and a rime. The onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster. The rime is the remainder of the syllable, excepting any inflectional endings or appendices. The internal structure of the rime was studied in four experiments. When an obstruent followed the vowel, subjects most readily divided the rime between the vowel and the obstruent. Thus, final consonant clusters beginning with obstruents formed cohesive units. Postvocalic liquids were grouped with the vowel rather than the final consonant. Postvocalic nasals were intermediate. These results are consistent with linguistic notions of a sonority hierarchy, by which classes of consonants differ in their affinity with vowels.

2012

The coordination of laryngeal and oral articulations for initial clusters in German was examined by means of transillumination and electropalatography. Both purely voiceless clusters as well as combinations with a sonorant were analyzed. The latter are of interest because it has been reported that introduction of a sonorant can actually increase the total duration of voicelessness. In fact, no consistent evidence for a lengthening of the devoicing gesture itself was found. However, the sonorant did induce a rearrangement of oral articulations relative to the glottal gesture. Over the complete corpus it appeared that the onset of glottal abduction is much more tightly linked to oral articulations than is peak glottal opening (despite the popularity of the latter for formulating principles of coordination). Results also indicated that it is unlikely that clusters like /st/ consist underlyingly of a blending of two gestures. It is argued that speakers learn to plan the glottal gesture to fulfil the aerodynamic requirements of the cluster as a whole.

2009

In this paper we investigate the behavior of Greek affricates as opposed to all other Greek cluster types. The phonotactics of the language as well as the data of an off-line experimental task support a preference for the preservation of affricates over stop+/s/ over /s/+stop clusters and all other clusters. A strong tendency of the participants in the experiment was to break up clusters by inserting a vowel while they retained almost all affricates intact. This linguistic behavior is attributed, first, to the identity of place of articulation of the consonants being members of the clusters and, second, to the (degree of) satisfaction of the scale of consonantal strength. Affricates tend to exhibit a limited degree of decomposition; stop+/s/ clusters exhibit a relative degree of decomposition, /s/+stop clusters undergo and even higher degree of decomposition while other cluster types are decomposed massively. Our assumption is that different degrees of decomposition are the result o...

2009

Abstract EMA was used to study the coordination of the articulatory gestures for C1 and C2 in onset clusters, firstly as a function of the segmental make-up of the clusters, and secondly as a function of stress and prosodic boundary conditions. The segmental results, which compared German and French, indicated a much lower degree of overlap of C1 and C2 for C2=/n/compared to C2=/l/(with C1=/p, b, k, g/). Overlap was also less for voiceless compared to voiced C1 for German.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008

This study investigates the effects of segmental composition and prosodic variation, namely boundary strength and lexical stress, on the production of word-initial clusters in German. The internal structure of the clusters /kl, kn, ks, sk/ has been analyzed by means of EPG recordings from seven speakers of German. Derived temporal and spatial parameters indicate that /kn/ is consistently produced with a lag between the consonants and /kl/ with considerable overlap. This categorical difference is also stable across stress and boundary conditions and is attributed to manner-based and perceptual recoverability constraints. No clear pattern emerges for /sk/ and /ks/. Therefore, stability of temporal organization across prosodic conditions is only tested for /kl/ and /kn/. Temporally, boundary level affects the duration of the adjacent consonant and the overlap within the clusters /kn/ and /kl/, whereas spatially /k/ is affected only in /kn/ but not in /kl/. Stress effects are not restricted to the nucleus but also affect the internal organization of the clusters. The interplay between segmental and prosodic timing effects indicates that the internal structure of clusters shows linguistically crucial and highly constrained timing patterns which can only vary within certain limits.

Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 2021

The paper presents the results of a complex study of сonsonantal phonemes' syntagmatics, registered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word throughout the historical development of the English language. The analysis of frequencies of consonantal clusters' actualization allowed the author to characterize the regularities of their occurring within the word structure as well as describe dynamics of their changes during the history of English. The following issues common for different languages are the main aspects for consideration of the problem elaborated in the paper: the emergence of new phonemic sequences (combinability), the occurrence of phonemic changes at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word, the emergence of new phonemes and phonologization processes of the already existing ones, new functional load of phonemes and their ability to combine, the suitability of consonants to join new clusters, the study of the phenomenon of phonemic...

PROCEEDINGS-NELS, 2004

Consonant clusters are often targeted by phonological processes that typically make them simpler.1 This brings up two questions of theoretical interest. First, why do cluster processes occur? One possible answer is that they occur to improve syllable structure (eg Steriade ...