Abstract
Olson (2022) claims that all bilabial trills in phonemic systems are releases of stops. They are either part of complex phonemes that involve stop-trill sequences, e.g. /pᴮ, bᴮ, ᵐbᴮ, tᴾ/, or they pattern as allophones of a compressed or fricative vowel following a stop, e.g. [pʙ̩, bʙ̩, tʙ̩]. Olson notes that the stop-trill phonemes behave as obstruents. I provide acoustic evidence for this claim. Previous studies indicate that the closure of /b/ is shorter than that of /p, ᵐb/ and that the oral portion of the closure of /ᵐb/ is very short (~30–40 ms). Likewise, it has been shown that the stop closure of /bᴮ/ is shorter than that of /pᴮ, ᵐbᴮ/ and that the oral portion of the stop closure of /ᵐbᴮ/ is very short (e.g. Olson 2023). For Medumba (Cameroon), we find similar patterning. The mean stop closure durations of /bᴮ, ᵐbᴮ/ are 137 ms (s.d. = 28, n = 58) and 192 ms (s.d. = 47, n = 28), respectively. The difference is very highly significant: t(37) = 5.79, p < 0.001 (one-tailed). The mean oral stop closure duration of /ᵐbᴮ/ is 26.6 ms (s.d. = 6.2, n = 28). The finding that stops with bilabial trill releases behave as obstruents is important, because elsewhere they have been categorized with /r/ assuming that they are sonorants.
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