The sonority hierarchy and the typology of geminate consonants

Katsura.Aoyama
Department of Communication Disorders, Texas Tech University

In Guinaang Bontok, all consonants (stops, fricatives, nasals, liquids and glides) can appear as short and long. Contrasts between short and long consonants are not as common as contrasts between short and long vowels (Ladefoged 1993), and not all consonants can appear as geminates even in the languages that have length contrasts. For instance, stops, nasals, fricatives and liquids can appear as both short and long in Finnish, but glides cannot. This study investigated geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok in order to examine whether the uncommon length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides (see Thurgood, 1993), were less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop consonants.

The participants were 4 native speakers of Guinaang Bontok (2 males, 2 females). The words were orthographically presented to the participants one by one. A frame sentence was also presented with the words. The participants were asked to say each word in isolation first, and then to repeat the word in the frame sentence twice. Thus three tokens (one in isolation and two in the frame sentence) were collected for each target word from each participant. A total of 32 words were acoustically analyzed for each participant.

Sixteen words included single consonants and the other sixteen words included geminate consonants. The target consonant always appeared intervocalically. The recordings were digitized and the data were analyzed acoustically. Wide-band spectrograms were produced for each target word and the durations of single and geminate nasals were measured in milliseconds. A total of 384 tokens (32 words x 3 repetitions x 4 participants) was analyzed.

The average durations of geminate consonants were clearly longer than those of single consonants in all consonants. The ratios between single and geminate consonants showed that geminate stops, nasals and liquids were twice as long as their short counterparts on average, whereas geminate glides were only 55% longer than their short counterparts on average. The average duration of short glides were 90 ms., which was about 10 ms. longer than short nasals and liquids on average (78 and 79 ms. respectively), and geminate glides were the shortest (139ms.) compared to other kinds of consonants.

It appears that the phonetic properties between single and geminate contrasts in Guinaang Bontok match with the crosslinguistic tendency; the results suggest that the durational contrasts are larger in more commonly found length contrasts (stops, nasals and liquids) than less commonly found contrasts (glides) in a language which has contrasts in all of them.

References
Ladefoged, P. (1993). A course in phonetics. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Thurgood, G. (1993). Geminates: A cross-linguistic examination. In J. A. Nevis & G. McMenamin & G. Thurgood (Eds.), Papers in honor of Frederick H. Brengelman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Department of Linguistics CSU Fresno (pp. 129-139). Fresno, CA: Department of Linguistics, California State University Fresno.