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Abstract:
Linguopalatal and acoustic data are reported on Majorcan
Catalan word final clusters composed of a voiced or voiceless
stop followed by l or r and preceded by either a vowel or a
homorganic nasal stopconsonant (e.g., /Vbl/ dobl I fold , /Vkl/
xucl I sip , /Nbl/ m'assembl I resemble , /Npl/ umpl I fill ).The
goal of the study is to find out the extent to which the
underlying stop voicing distinction is kept at the phonetic level
in the clusters of interest and, if so, whether the stop and the
following consonant form a separate syllable or not. Data show
that the underlying voicing distinction in the stop is preserved
under certain favorable phonetic conditions which runs against
the existence of a strong version of a devoicing rule for
syllable-final voiced stops in this dialect. Indeed, underlying
voicing occurs more easily in postnasal vs postvocalic stop
sequences, for a bilabial stop before l among postvocalic
clusters, and for any stop beforel and for the pair /dr/-/tr/
among clusters preceded by a nasal consonant. Other phonetic
properties appear toreinforce the presence vs absence of vocal
fold vibration along the stop closure period, i.e., differences
in closure duration (mostly so in nasal clusters), presence vs
absence of friction (in clusters with l) and degreeof gestural
overlap between l and the preceding stop (in all clusters). Some
of these phonetic characteristicsmay become primary cues of the
underlying voicing contrast in those instances in which vocal
fold vibration does not play a distinctive role. Several findings
argue against the syllabic nature of the liquid, i.e., the fact
that the presence of voicing in l is necessarily linked to the
presence of phonetic voicing in the preceding stopand that r is
kept voiceless in spite of not being realized as a trill. In
agreement with this observation, theinsertion of a vocalic
element in some of the clusters under analysis was found to be
phonetically conditioned and its duration was judged to be too
short to be categorized as a full vowel segment. Speakers were
found to differ with respect to the robustness of the phonetic
cues signalling underlying stop voicing which suggests that a
change towards complete voicing neutralization is in
progress.
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