Place of articulation for consonants: Comparing nasals and stops, and syllable position

Abstract

This study reports on measurements of transitions of the second formant (F2) for syllable-initial and syllable-final nasal and stop consonants in English, as cues to place of articulation. F2 values and the amount and direction of F2 changes in a 20 ms interval were determined in vowels adjacent to consonant ‘‘implosion’’ and release. The corpus included consonants in sentences and isolated nonsense syllables. The F2 transitions for a given place of articulation are roughly similar for nasals and stops for different syllable positions, as expected, but some interesting differences exist. Since the stop-consonant bursts influence the spectrum sampling point relative to release, there are some shifts in F2 onset frequencies for stops, as compared to nasals. Syllable-initial alveolars show additional manner differences, which can be attributed to differences in tongue configurations for alveolar nasals relative to stops in back-vowel contexts. These latter shifts are tentatively ascribed to differential coarticulatory effects for /n/ versus /d/ and /t/ differences which might be related to the lack of a distinctive syllable-initial velar nasal in English. There are also systematic shifts in F2 transitions as a function of syllable position, for both nasals and stops. [Supported in part by NIH Grants DC00075 and DC02525.]