Word–initial versus word–final consonant articulation

Abstract

The position of a consonant within its prosodic word is known to have an effect on the degree, or strength, of its articulatory stricture: in stronger prosodic positions, the active articulator may be higher, making the oral opening smaller. This study examines the robustness of this asymmetry in consonant articulation. Electropalatography was used with five speakers to determine linguo–palatal contact for several English consonants in word–initial versus word–final position. The various experiments manipulated such factors as identity of the consonant, the test word’s lexical stress, its position in its sentence, and phrasal accent in the sentence. Results show that: (1) noncontinuant consonants generally have more contact in word–initial than word–final position, but sibilant fricatives do not; (2) intonational–phrase–final position is a strong position, so that word–final consonants /t d n/, which are also sentence final often show little word–final weakening (/l/ is an exception for some speakers); and (3) in contrast to this positional effect, lexical stress and phrasal accent never strengthen word–final consonants in this way, nor do these prosodic factors consistently strengthen word–initial consonants. [Work supported by NSF.]