The phonetic implementation of underlying and epenthetic stops in word final clusters in Valencian Catalan

Abstract

Data for closure duration and the stop burst, as well as on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments, reveal that speakers of Valencian Catalan produce differently the clusters /lts/ and /ls/, and /rts/ and /rs/, where /t/ is an underlying phoneme in /lts,rts/ and stop epenthesis may occur in /ls,rs/. Only a subset of speakers contrast the production of the nasal cluster pairs /mps/–/ms/ and /nts/–/ns/. Stop epenthesis applies regularly in the sequences /ms,ns,ls, ʎs, ɲs/ but the inserted segment is only phonetically robust in the two latter clusters with an alveolopalatal consonant and to some extent in /ns/, and practically absent in the sequence /rs/. Differences in prominence for the stop consonant, whether underlying or epenthetic, occur as a function of the segmental composition of the cluster, as well as of utterance position and syllable and word affiliation. In conjunction with results from perception tests, it is claimed that these data contribute to our understanding of oral stop deletion after a (quasi-)homorganic consonant in word final clusters without /s/ in other dialects of Catalan and perhaps other languages.