Testing Licensing by Cue: A Case of Russian Palatalized Coronals

Abstract

Abstract The hypothesis ‘licensing by cue’ by Steriade holds that phonological contrastsare maintained in environments that provide better acoustic cues to the contrastsand are neutralized in environments that provide poorer acoustic cues or nocues. This paper tests the hypothesis by examining the distribution of a phonologicalcontrast - the Russian plain/palatalized coronal stops /t/ and /t^j/ in various syllable-final contexts. The results of a series of acoustic and perceptual experimentspresented in this paper provide some support for the hypothesis: the relativesalience of releases in different word boundary contexts (_#k > _#n, _#s) correlatesstrongly with the general patterns of neutralization of the contrast in similarword-internal contexts (_k > _n, _s) in Russian and other related languages. At thesame time, the relative salience of VC transitions in different vowel contexts(a_ > u_ > i_) has apparently little to do with attested patterns of neutralization.The results suggest that some perceptual cues are phonologically more relevantthan others, providing evidence for interactions between phonetics and phonologymore complex than predicted by the hypothesis.