Timing effects on successive alveolar consonants in Swedish

Abstract

The duration of a consonant is potentially affected by various factors related to the phonetic nature of the segment and its phonetic environment. The present study addresses the concurrent effects of prominence, syllable structure, and manner of articulation in intervocalic /s/+alveolar consonant /t, n, l/, and alveolar consonant+/s/ clusters in Swedish. Six real words, imbedded in a carrier sentence, were repeated five times with, and five times without, focal accent by ten native speakers of standard Swedish. Results show that the duration of a cluster, and the duration of its constituent consonants, are longer with focal accent than without focal accent. Consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member do not differ in duration from consonant clusters with /s/ as the second member. Clusters containing an alveolar stop are shorter than clusters with an alveolar nasal or alveolar liquid. The duration of /s/ is always longer than the duration of any adjacent alveolar stop, nasal or liquid. A number of interactions was found between prominence, cluster structure, and manner of articulation, indicating clear differences between the patterns of cluster internal timing for the investigated cluster pairs. These differences will be presented, compared with data on American English, and discussed.