Consequences of prosodic variation for spatiotemporal organization in Spanish stop-lateral clusters

Using articulatory data from five Spanish speakers, we study how stop-lateral-vowel sequences respond to perturbations of phonetic parameters in the segments that compose them. Target words with stop-lateral complex onsets were embedded in different prosodic contexts. Regardless of prosodic context, stability-based indices for the presumed global organization of the elicited stop-lateral complex onsets do not show the expected patterns. Nevertheless, evidence for global organization does emerge in the presence of compensatory relations among phonetic parameters which vary as a result of prosodic modulations. Thus, as stop duration and the lag between the two consonants in a cluster increases, the vowel begins earlier in relation to the preceding lateral. Similarly, as the lag in the stop-lateral transition increases, lateral duration decreases. That is, local changes to some part of the sequence produces (language-particular) compensatory effects propagating to other parts of the sequence, in attestation of the global organization presiding over the entire stop-lateral-vowel sequence. We relate our results to independently observed properties usually associated with the idea that Spanish is a syllable-timed language and draw implications for the link between qualitative phonological organization and continuous phonetics.