Abstract
Phoneticians have generally claimed that, in sequences of two‐stop consonants in English, the first stop is often unreleased. To examine this claim, we recorded sentences, produced by several native speakers of American English at a conversational rate, containing disyllabic words with one of the 24 possible sequences of two nonhomorganic stops across the syllable boundary (e.g., cactus, pigpen). In addition, several sentences containing words with two stops in final position were recorded (e.g., act, sobbed). Oscillograms of the critical words revealed that releases of the first stop were nearly always present, except in those instances where the second stop was bilabial. This is a reasonable result when one considers the articulatory maneuvers involved. Since many of the releases we observed were acoustically rather weak, they may be difficult to detect by ear and thus may escape even the careful listener's attention. [Work supported by NICHD and BRS.]
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