Word-internal ambisyllabic consonants are codas

Abstract

The syllabic affiliation of ambisyllabic consonants (e.g., the word-medial consonants in happy and Danny) is unclear. Research on ambisyllabic consonants has revealed an inconsistent set of phonetic correlates (Krakow, 1989; Turk, 1994; Gick, 2004). While some suggest they behave as onsets or codas (but not both simultaneously), others suggest their gestural durations are intermediate between onsets/codas. At least some of the research is based on comparisons of the ambisyllabic consonants to word-edge onsets/codas. However, comparisons to word-edges are confounded by the fact that such consonants undergo domain-edge related changes (Fougeron, 2001; Keating et al., 2003b). Here, we control for this confound, and compare ambisyllabic consonants to word-medial onsets and codas. We conducted an experiment on 10 native English speakers, who produced 15 repetitions at three different speech rates of 16 English words (8 test, 8 filler) that consisted of the nasal consonants [n or m] in one of four positions: word-medial onset, word-medial coda, word-final coda, and ambisyllabic context (e.g., gamete, gamble, gam, and gamma). The results suggest: (1) Consistent with previous research, there are durational differences between word-medial and word-final nasal codas; (2) Ambisyllabic consonants clearly pattern with the word-medial nasal codas and are significantly different from the nasal onsets.