Palatalization in Romanian - Acoustic properties and perception

While cross-linguistic distributional patterns and perceptual studies of secondary palatalization suggest the existence of an asymmetry whereby the contrast between plain and palatalized consonants at the labial place of articulation is more marked than at the coronal place, a reversal of this pattern was noted in previous studies of Romanian, as far as perception is concerned. This paper presents the results of an acoustic study of five fricatives from four places of articulation produced by thirty-one native speakers of Romanian, as well as those of a perceptual study using the stimuli from the acoustic experiment, allowing for a direct comparison between acoustic properties and perception. It was found that there are greater acoustic differences between plain and palatalized labials and dorsals as compared to coronals, an unexpected result in light of the existing generalizations. The acoustic results were paralleled by the perceptual findings. Several possible causes for these patterns are discussed: the phonemic status and morphological conditioning of palatalization in Romanian as opposed to other languages, its phonetic realization, enhancement strategies, and its restriction to syllable-final position. One of the main questions that arise in the context of this study is just how deeply one must reach to uncover ’pure’ markedness patterns.