In Faroese, coda /kst/ clusters undergo metathesis, surfacing as skt before vowels in monosyllables. However, evidence from other languages suggests that metathesis is often phonetically incomplete. We test whether this is the case in Faroese by comparing the voice quality of vowels before /kst/ clusters to vowels before /k/-obstruent (less coarticulatory breathiness/noise) and /s/-obstruent clusters (more noise). The results show that speakers variably produced /kst/ clusters with metathesis (/feskt/ as fekst), but also with /k/-deletion (/naskt/ as nast). A linear discriminant analysis (LDA) over the last third of the vowel was run to differentiate the four categories of words (k/-obstruent, /s/-obstruent, /k/-deletion, and metathesis words), which included F0 and common linguistic measures of spectral tilt and noise. The LDA had a correct classification score of 82.0%, to which the first linear discriminant (LD1) contributed 96.1%. The top contributors to LD1 were H1*–A2*, H1*–A3*, and H1*–A1*. However, inspection of the results revealed that words with metathesis were systematically miscategorized. Linear mixed effects regression models on H1*–A2*, H1*–A3*, and H1*–A1* revealed that words with metathesis never differed significantly from words with /k/-obstruent and /s/-obstruent clusters, indicating that in terms of voice quality, metathesis, when it occurs in Faroese, may be phonetically incomplete.
Peña et al. (Wed,) studied this question.