Is a Stop Consonant Released when Followed by Another Stop Consonant?

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Abstract
Many phonetics textbooks state that, in sequences of two stop consonants in English, the first stop is commonly unreleased. For nonhomorganic stop consonant sequences, this statement may be taken to imply that the (necessary) articulatory release of the first stop has no observable acoustic consequences. To examine this claim, we recorded sentences, produced by several native speakers of American English at a conversational rate, containing word-internal sequences of two nonhomorganic stops, either across a syllable boundary (e.g., cactus, pigpen), or in word-final position (e.g., act, sobbed). Oscillograms of the critical words revealed that release bursts of the first stop occurred in the majority of tokens, except in those where the second stop was bilabial. The bursts were acoustically rather weak and difficult to detect by ear, which may account for their having been neglected in the literature. Instead of a simple ‘released’-‘unreleased’ distinction, we propose five classification categories which make use of articulatory, acoustic, perceptua and contrastive phonetic criteria.

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