The Internal Structure of Nasal-Stop Sequences: Evidence from Austronesian

The phonological and phonetic structure of nasal-stop sequences has elicited much attention. Yet, less is known about the internal timing of nasal-stop sequences than often assumed. This includes clusters, both nasal voiced-stop clusters (ND) and nasal voiceless-stop clusters (NT); and unary cases, most commonly prenasalized stops ( N D) but also so-called postploded nasals (N D ). 1 The latter are cases that have been described as being in some sense the mirror image of prenasalized stops, where the segment is taken to be primarily nasal, but with an oral release. (Nasal-stop sequence, or NC sequence, is used here to refer to both unary and cluster cases.) Based on impressionistic phonological descriptions, we would expect the phonetic timing relationships schematized in Figure 1. First, in terms of overall duration, prenasalized stops (a) and postploded nasals (b) are expected to have roughly the overall duration of a single segment and nasal-stop clusters (c & d) should be longer, in line with the duration of other clusters in the language (Riehl 2008). In terms of relative duration of the nasal and oral components, in the case of prenasalized stops (a), the nasal component is expected to be quite brief, taking up just the beginning of the total duration. While in the case of postploded nasals (b), the converse is expected, with the nasal closure taking up the majority of the total duration and only a brief period of oral closure. In the case of nasal voiced-stop and nasal voiceless-stop clusters (c & d), the total duration is expected to be roughly evenly divided between the nasal component and oral component for both cases.