Durations and Contexts as Cues to Word-Final Cognate Opposition in English

Abstract Many perceptual and acoustic studies of word-final cognate opposition have relied mainly on isolated synthetic utterances and have usually concluded that one or another of the potential cues is primary. Recent studies of natural speech segment durations in samples of connected discourse have raised questions about the efficacy of such cues. In the experiments reported here, naturally produced tokens of the word peg were excised from two different contexts and acoustically analyzed. One representative token from each context was then edited in several ways in order to ascertain the cue values of a number of variables. The stimuli were tested in isolation, in their original contexts and in contexts from which the word peck had been deleted. The results of the experiments indicate that a number of variables can be sufficient cues to cognate opposition, and that the efficacy of a particular cue depends in a large measure both on the context from which it was extracted and on the context in which it is heard. The potentially large number of cues, their temporal distribution and their variable effectiveness suggest that future research should be focussed on discovering and describing a general articulatory strategy underlying both the production and perception of cognate oppositions.