engleski

Continuancy in nasal place assimilation: An electropalatographic study

Recent phonological studies suggested on purely formal (rule-based) grounds that in Croatian, an underlying alveolar nasal /n/ assimilates in place as well as in continuancy to velar obstruents /k, g, x/, but so far this claim has not been verified experimentally. Thus, in this study, electropalatography (EPG) was used in order to investigate tongue-to-palate contact patterns during the production of Croatian alveolar nasal + velar obstruent clusters. Five native Croatian speakers were recorded while producing seven distinct utterances containing the relevant clusters for six times each. The differences between assimilation conditions (/nx/ vs. /nk/ and /ng/) were tested using Repeated Measures ANOVA. The results showed that nasal place assimilation is consistently present in all examined speakers and that it is generally coupled with continuancy assimilation: underlying /n/ surfaces as a continuant [ŋ] before /x/ and as a non- continuant [ŋ] before /k/ and /g/. Implications of these results for phonological theory are considered and ways to obviate the limitations of the present study are discussed.

continuancy ; nasal place assimilation ; nasal velar continuant ; electropalatography (EPG)

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