geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay

Journal of Phonetics 58 (2016) 135–151

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Journal of Phonetics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics

Research Article

Closure duration as an acoustic correlate of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay Mohd Hilmi Hamzah a,n, Janet Fletcher b, John Hajek b a b

Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia

A R T I C L E

I N F O

Article history: Received 26 June 2015 Received in revised form 31 July 2016 Accepted 1 August 2016 Available online 29 August 2016 Keywords: Geminate Closure duration Stops Sonorants Voicing Kelantan Malay

A B S T R A C T

Closure duration has been established cross-linguistically as the universally most reliable and consistent acoustic feature of consonant gemination. In this study, we conduct an acoustic phonetic analysis of the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) in order to explore the extent to which closure duration marks such a contrast in this Malay variety. KM is particularly unusual among the world's languages in that the contrast is restricted to word-initial position. A corpus of elicited materials consisting of singleton/geminate voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants were produced in words in isolation (i.e., utterance-initial position) and in a carrier sentence (i.e., utterance-medial position) by sixteen native speakers of KM. Results show that closure duration is a robust acoustic correlate of the consonant contrast in KM, i.e., word-initial geminates in KM are always associated with significantly longer closure duration than their corresponding singletons. The closure duration differences between singletons and geminates are also similar across utterance positions (at least for voiced stops and sonorants). In utterance-medial contexts, the effect is particularly strong in the closure duration of voiceless stops. Overall, closure duration is indeed a highly robust acoustic marker for this cross-linguistically rare word-initial consonant contrast in KM. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In experimental phonetic investigations of consonant gemination, the focus is usually on geminates that occur in word-medial position (e.g., Aoyama & Reid, 2006 on Guinaang Bontok; Ham, 2001 on Lebanese Arabic; Hansen, 2004 on Persian), while much less attention is given to word-initial geminates, which are claimed to be rare in the world's languages (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Indeed, some researchers (e.g., DiCanio, 2008; Dmitrieva, 2012; Kawahara, 2005, Kraehenmann, 2011, among others) argue that word-initial geminates are more phonologically dispreferred than word-medial geminates. This could be potentially due to the difficulties of perceiving clear contrasts in utterance-initial and word-initial contexts. For example, Padgett (2009) suggests that any consonant contrast is better situated in an intervocalic context that offers a clear beginning and an end point for the perception of the target consonant. By way of contrast, in word-initial position, there may be poorer perceptual cues to closure duration, especially in the case of voiceless stops where there are no acoustic cues to occlusion at the start of an utterance (see, e.g., Kraehenmann & Lahiri, 2008). On the other hand, native listeners of languages with word-initial geminates can reliably differentiate the contrasting phonemes even for voiceless stops in utterance-initial position, as shown for Pattani Malay (Abramson, 1986) and also for Cypriot Greek (Muller, 2001). These results indicate that additional parameters, such as intensity and f0, likely function as critical secondary cues in this context, as Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996:94) point out. In this study, we aim to contribute to a greater understanding of consonant gemination across the world's languages with a detailed acoustic phonetic analysis of word-initial singleton/geminate duration in Kelantan Malay (KM), spoken in Malaysia. We focus specifically on the closure durations of voiced stops and sonorants (in which closure duration can be reliably measured in all contexts) as well as on those of voiceless stops embedded in a carrier sentence. Our main motivation is to identify the degree to which closure duration underlies the word-initial consonant length distinction in KM and also, to the extent that it is possible, compare

n

Corresponding author. Fax: + 60 4 928 5382. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.H. Hamzah).

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results for KM with those reported by Abramson (1986) for closely related Pattani Malay (PM) and with relevant findings for other languages with geminate consonants (e.g., Ridouane, 2007 on Tashlhiyt Berber). The current experimental investigation will also examine the extent to which closure duration in KM singletons and geminates is further conditioned by factors such as utterance position (i.e., utterance-initial or utterance-medial positions), manner of articulation (e.g., stops or sonorants), voicing type (i.e., voiceless or voiced stops) and phoneme type within each manner category. This is drawn from the findings of past studies (e.g., Engstrand & Krull, 1994) which have shown that consonant gemination may vary in different contexts and environments (Section 1.4 will describe these factors in detail). It is worth noting that, to date, no experimental phonetic research has been conducted on KM beyond a small number of short research papers directly associated with this study (i.e., Hamzah, 2010; Hamzah, Fletcher, & Hajek, 2011, 2012b, 2014, 2015, Hamzah, Hajek, & Fletcher, 2012a). The current study is therefore novel in that it is the most detailed investigation yet of the wordinitial consonant contrast in KM which, like closely related PM,1 only has geminate consonants in word-initial position. Our goal is to examine whether word-initial closure duration is a robust acoustic marker in defining geminate consonants, in line with other languages with medial geminates (see Section 1.2). More broadly, the findings will make a significant contribution to our understanding of KM and less-well studied language varieties as well as to the field of acoustic phonetics dealing with a relatively rare cross-linguistic phenomenon such as word-initial consonant gemination. 1.1. Kelantan Malay KM is part of the larger Malay language family spoken in the Malay archipelago. In Malaysia, KM is the primary lingua franca used by more than 1.5 million speakers in the state of Kelantan, which is located in the north-eastern part of the Malay Peninsula in Malaysia. This Malay variety stands out among most other such varieties in Malaysia because of the rare presence of geminate consonants in word-initial and, by extension, utterance-initial position. While KM and PM are mutually intelligible, it is crucial to note that PM in Thailand is different from KM in Malaysia in that the former is in intense contact with Thai, a lexical tone language, while the latter is in close contact with Standard Malay, a non-tonal language that is also the official and national language of Malaysia. As mentioned earlier, there has been no experimental research that can offer empirical data for KM word-initial geminates beyond our own small-scale studies. Earlier works (e.g., Aziz & Ahmad, 2008; Karim, 1965; Mahmood, 2006) were only based on impressionistic evaluation, in which word-initial geminates were described phonologically, sometimes within a particular theoretical framework (e.g., within Optimality Theory by Aziz and Ahmad (2008)) but with no actual phonetic evidence provided. Karim (1965) observes that geminate consonants in KM occur only in word-initial position - across all places and manners of articulation. She notes that word-initial consonant gemination in KM is typically the “compensated” form of original syllables, words or phrases that are retained in Standard Malay. As shown in Examples 1.1 to 1.3 below, consonant gemination in KM can be accounted for by, for example, the “loss” of prepositional phrases (Example 1.1), and syllable reduction and assimilation in trisyllabic nouns (Example 1.2) and in reduplicated nouns (Example 1.3). (1.1) (1.2) (1.3)

Standard Malay: /kə+dapo/ ‘to the kitchen’ Kelantan Malay: /ddapo/ Standard Malay: /pusakə/ ‘heritage’ Kelantan Malay: /ssakɔ/ Standard Malay: /pagi pagi/ ‘early morning’ Kelantan Malay: /ppagi/

Geminates are easily found to contrast with singletons, as seen in a few examples here, and more copiously in our experimental data set shown in Table 3 in Section 2.1: /pagi/ ‘morning’ /tʃɔleʔ/ ‘to dip’ /katɔʔ/ ‘to strike’

v. v. v.

/ppagi/ ‘early morning’ /ttʃɔleʔ/ ‘pickles’ /kkatɔʔ/ ‘frog’

1.2. Closure duration in geminates Traditionally, the term ‘geminates’ is used to describe a class of consonants that are produced with longer constriction duration than their short counterparts. Geminate consonants are therefore often defined phonologically as being long since the phonetic signature most commonly associated with them is increased duration relative to their singleton counterparts (e.g., Hankamer, Lahiri, & Koreman, 1989). It is well established across languages that the singleton/geminate contrast, either word-initially or word-medially, is distinguished primarily by a difference in consonant closure duration. Table 1 shows a list of 39 languages for which previous experimental investigation has confirmed closure duration to be a reliable and consistent acoustic parameter of the singleton/ 1 Abramson's critically important work on word-initial consonant gemination in PM, presented in a series of papers (e.g., 1986, 1998, 2003), focuses primarily on the perceptual basis of the singleton/geminate contrast in that variety. Presentation of closure duration data appears to be largely limited to a single plot, based on one speaker, in Abramson (1987:69).

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137

Table 1 A review of 39 languages with word-initial and/or word-medial consonant contrasts (expanded from Ridouane (2010)): ‘ + ’ shows that closure duration varies significantly as a function of the consonant contrast (at least p < .05); unmarked cells indicate that the consonant contrast does not occur in a given position in a word. The results for PM are highlighted in bold. Languages and references

Wordmedial

Bengali (e.g., Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988) Bernese (e.g., Ham, 2001) Buginese (e.g., Cohn, Ham, & Podesva, 1999) Burarran (e.g., Baker, 2008) Cypriot Greek (e.g., Muller, 2001) Egyptian Arabic (e.g., Kawahara, 2007) Estonian (e.g., Engstrand & Krull, 1994) Finnish (e.g., Engstrand & Krull, 1994) Guinaang Bontok (e.g., Aoyama & Reid, 2006) Hindi (e.g., Ohala & Ohala, 1992) Hungarian (e.g., Ham, 2001) Icelandic (e.g., Pind, 1999) Ingrian (e.g., Markus, 2010) Iraqi Arabic (e.g., Hassan, 2002) Italian (e.g., Payne, 2005) Japanese (e.g., Kawahara, 2005) Jawon (e.g., Jaeger, 1978) Lebanese Arabic (e.g., Ham, 2001) Levantine Arabic (e.g., Ham, 2001) Madurese (e.g., Cohn et al., 1999) Malayalam (e.g., Local & Simpson, 1999; Kraehenmann, Fitzpatrick, Lahiri, & Mohanan, 2000) Marathi (e.g., Lisker, 1957) Moroccan Arabic (e.g., Pajak, 2009) Norwegian (e.g., Fintoft, 1961) Ngalakgan (e.g., Baker, 2008) Palestinian Arabic (e.g., Miller, 1987) Pattani Malay (e.g., Abramson, 1987) Persian (e.g., Hansen, 2004) Polish (e.g., Thurgood, 2002) Rembarrnga (e.g., Mckay, 1980) Russian (e.g., Dmitrieva, 2012) Sinhala (e.g., Letterman, 1994) Swedish (e.g., Engstrand & Krull, 1994) Swiss German (e.g., Kraehenmann & Lahiri, 2008) Tamil (e.g., Keane, 2006) Tarifit Berber (e.g., Bouarourou et al., 2011) Tashlhiyt Berber (e.g., Ridouane, 2010) Toba Batak (e.g., Cohn et al., 1999) Turkish (e.g., Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Wordinitial

+

+

+

+

+ + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + +

geminate contrast. It is worth noting that all the languages reported here exhibit longer closure duration for geminates relative to singletons regardless of position in a word. Crucially, however, only a handful of languages surveyed here contrast singletons and geminates in word-initial position, and, of these, only PM, like KM, has geminates in word-initial position only. In PM, for instance, word-initial geminates, across contexts, have an average closure duration of 186 ms, while their corresponding singletons have an average closure duration of only 66 ms.2 Further, the magnitude of contrast between word-initial singletons and geminates in PM is consistent across utterance-initial and utterance-medial positions, although the durational contrast is smaller in the former than in the latter.3 In any case, the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in PM is clearly marked via closure duration with considerably longer duration for geminate consonants compared to singletons. In other languages with word-medial geminates, a similar pattern can also be observed. In Malayalam, for example, the mean closure durations are 52 ms for singleton consonants and 175 ms for geminate consonants (Local & Simpson, 1999), in line with findings for many languages including for Turkish and Bengali (Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988). A number of studies have also established that closure duration is maintained across different speaking rates so that the consonant contrast is preserved, such as in Tarifit Berber (Bouarourou et al., 2011), Egyptian Arabic (Kawahara, 2005) and Cypriot Greek (Muller, 2001). With regard to utterance-initial voiceless stop contrasts where there is no acoustic cue to the onset of occlusion in word-initial position, experimental articulatory research using electropalatography (e.g., Kraehenmann & Lahiri, 2008; Ridouane, 2010) has confirmed reliable duration differences in the closure phase of the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast for voiceless stops. That is to say, articulatorily, closure duration differences also contribute to the singleton/geminate contrast in the case of utterance-initial voiceless stops. These figures are extrapolated through visual inspection and averaging across contexts by the authors of data points in Fig. 1 provided by Abramson (1987:69). The closure duration results according to utterance position in PM are skewed by the absence of voiceless stops in utterance-initial position. Exclusion is a result of the inability to determine closure onset, as also discussed in the main text. Their presence in utterance-medial position significantly increases the contrast magnitude between singletons and geminates (Abramson, 1987). 2 3

138 Table 2 A review of geminate-to-singleton duration ratios in 13 languages with word-initial and/or word-medial consonant contrasts ranked from the largest (top row) to the smallest reported ratio (bottom row). The duration ratio for PM is highlighted in bold (‘Wi’ word-initial position; ‘Wm’ word-medial position). Position in word

Segments measured

Utterance context and number of repetitions

Speakers

Duration ratio (geminate/singleton)

Malayalam (Local & Simpson, 1999) Turkish (Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988) Pattani Malay (Abramson, 1987) Ingrian (Markus, 2010)

Wm

nasals [m,n], liquid [l]

isolation (4 times) and carrier sentence (2 times)

1 male speaker

3.40

Wm

voiceless stops [t,k]

isolation (3 times)

3 male speakers

2.93

Wi

1 male speaker

2.83

1 female speaker

2.80

Wm

voiceless stops, voiced stops, affricates, fricatives, nasals, laterals (specific isolation and carrier sentence (number of segments were not reported) repetitions was not reported) voiceless stops [p,t,k] carrier sentence (number of repetitions was not reported) voiceless stops [p,t,k], voiced stops [b,d,g] carrier sentence (6 times)

3 female speakers

2.35

Wm Wi/Wm

voiceless stop [t], voiced stop [d] voiceless stop [t], voiced stop [d], voiceless fricative [s], nasal [n], liquid [l]

carrier sentence (3 times) isolation (3 times)

2.21 2.00/1.70

Wi/Wm

voiceless fricative [s], voiced fricative [z]

isolation (9 times)

Wm Wm

voiceless stops [p,t,k,t̻, tʰ,c], voiced stop [d], voiceless fricative [s], voiced fricative carrier sentence (number of repetitions was not [ ʝ ], nasal [n], liquid [l] reported) voiceless retroflex stop [ʈ] isolation (3 times)

3 speakers (1 male, 2 females) 5 speakers (gender type was not reported) 1 speaker (gender type was not reported) 3 male speakers

1.94

Wm

voiceless palatal stop [c]

carrier sentence (2 times)

Wm Wi/Wm

voiceless stops [p,t], voiced stops [b,d], voiceless fricative [f], nasal [m], liquid [l] voiceless stops [p,t,k], voiceless fricative [s]

carrier sentence (4 times) isolation (3 times) and carrier sentence (3 times)

3 speakers (gender type was not reported) 31 speakers (13 males, 18 females) 5 male speakers 6 speakers (3 males, 3 females)

Japanese (Kawahara, 2005) Persian (Hansen, 2004) Russian (Dmitrieva, 2012) Moroccan Arabic (Pajak, 2009) Hindi (Ohala & Ohala, 1992) Bengali (Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988) Icelandic (Pind, 1999) Italian (Payne, 2005) Cypriot Greek (Muller, 2001)

Wm

1.85/2.00 1.96

1.66 1.56 1.25/1.45

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Languages and references

M.H. Hamzah et al. / Journal of Phonetics 58 (2016) 135–151

139

1.3. Duration ratios The singleton/geminate duration ratio is particularly relevant in the context of geminate production and perception given that increased duration ratios are usually associated with geminates that are perceptually challenging, such as word-initial geminates. The cross-linguistic diversity of geminate-to-singleton duration ratios is exemplified in Table 2 (rightmost column). The duration ratio results presented in the table are of course indicative only, given the significant methodological differences across the listed studies, i.e., there are differences in terms of, among others, segments, utterance context, number of repetitions and speakers employed in each study reviewed (see columns 3–5 in Table 2). Notwithstanding these caveats, it can be seen in Table 2 that there is a wide range of duration ratios across these languages, ranging from 1.25 (Cypriot Greek, word-initial) to 3.40 (Malayalam, word-medial). Researchers have put forward different proposals to explain why the ratios of geminate-to-singleton durations vary so much across languages. First, Engstrand and Krull (1994) claim that duration contrasts are maintained more consistently in quantity-based languages (e.g., Finnish and Estonian), i.e., languages in which durations are primarily used to distinguish word meaning, as Lehiste (1970) points out (see also Šimko, O'Dell, and Vainio (2014); Yoshida, de Jong, Kruschke, and Päiviö (2015)). Ham (2001) further reasons that duration ratios between singletons and geminates are potentially larger for mora-timed languages than for syllable-timed languages. More recently, Pajak (2009) reasons that the variation in duration ratios may be perceptually driven, i.e., increased duration ratios may probably reflect an attempt to compensate for otherwise lesser perceptibility of word-initial geminates, as suggested by, e.g., Kawahara (2007). Based on these earlier studies of a range of different languages (i.e., Engstrand & Krull, 1994; Ham, 2001; Pajak, 2009), those showing relatively higher duration ratios in Table 2 (like PM, Malayalam, Turkish and Ingrian) have phonological quantity contrasts (Engstrand & Krull, 1994) or have been analyzed as mora-timed (Ham, 2001). In addition, in light of Pajak's (2009) proposal, it could also be hypothesized that these languages may possess perceptually-challenging geminates in their inventories. The case of PM is of critical importance here as this language, closely related to KM, only allows word-initial geminates which, as noted earlier, are more phonologically dispreferred than word-medial geminates (cf. Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Further, Goedemans (1998) also argues that an extremely high duration ratio is essential for the length distinction in syllable onset position to be audible from a perceptual perspective.4 It should also be noted, however, that duration ratios are also extremely high for some languages with word-medial geminates such as Malayalam (Local & Simpson, 1999) and Turkish (Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988), although only a limited range of contrasts were explored in these studies compared to the current investigation of KM (Section 2.0 will describe the research design in KM in detail). 1.4. Some factors affecting the word-initial consonant contrast As noted earlier in Section 1.0, the magnitude of durational contrast due to gemination may be conditioned by other factors such as utterance position (i.e., utterance-initial or -medial positions), manner of articulation (e.g., stops or sonorants), voicing status (i.e., voiceless or voiced stops) and also phoneme type within each manner category. In many languages, consonants of all manners and voicing types can usually be geminated (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). In Moroccan Arabic (Heath, 1987), for example, the entire segment inventory, including stops and sonorants, may be geminated although stops are considered as the most common type of geminate across languages (see, e.g., Aoyama & Reid, 2006; Kochetov, Sreedevi, Kasim, & Manjula, 2014). Within stops, variation in consonant gemination due to voicing status has been reported in many studies (e.g., Engstrand & Krull, 1994). Voiceless stop geminates are of particular interest, especially with regard to word-initial consonant contrasts (see, e.g., Abramson, 1998). As noted earlier, the lack of clear acoustic marking of initial occlusion of voiceless stops in utterance-initial position has led many researchers (e.g., Ridouane, 2007) to claim that secondary cues, beyond closure duration, may contribute to the contrast in this context. As for voiced stop geminates, they occur less frequently than voiceless stop geminates even in medial position (see, e.g., Kawahara, 2005 for Japanese). It has also been claimed that voiced stop geminates are cross-linguistically more marked than voiceless stop geminates. For example, Jaeger (1978), and Ohala and Riordan (1979) propose that this is due to the aerodynamic difficulty in sustaining voicing within obstruent closure. That is, the longer prevoicing that is required during the initial closure of word-initial voiced stop geminates in order to maintain the contrast with their singleton counterparts is more effortful than in other segments, e.g., sonorants. In many cases, voicing during the closure phase of voiced stop geminates is reported to be weakened and absent (e.g., Taylor, 1985). With respect to sonorant geminates, Payne (2005) argues that there is an “in-built relationship” between singleton and geminate sonorants, calling sonorants particularly “successful geminates”. As shown in Table 2 earlier, word-medial sonorants in Malayalam (Local & Simpson, 1999) display the highest duration ratio (i.e., 3.40) among other languages listed. Further, a number of studies (e.g., Khattab, 2007 for Lebanese Arabic) have also shown that geminate-to-singleton duration ratios are always higher for sonorants than for other manners of articulation. By contrast, some studies (e.g., Kawahara, 2013 for Japanese) have shown that the singleton/geminate duration ratios are much smaller for nasals than for stops. Variation in consonant gemination has also been observed for word-medial fricatives in Japanese (Kawahara, 2015) for which the singleton/geminate duration ratios are usually smaller for fricatives than for stops. Crucially for the current study of KM, it remains to be seen exactly how this contrast is realized acoustically in consonants that vary in manner and phoneme type. Besides the consonant variables of manner/place and voicing, utterance position is also another potential conditioning factor in the realization of the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast. There is a well-known association between utterance position and consonant contrast enhancement which is often referred to in the literature as domain-initial strengthening (see, e.g., Cho, 2001; Cho 4 Goedeman's (1998) argument is based on his analysis of syllable weight and geminate onsets, which are claimed to be highly unlikely given poor durational cues in word-onset position, albeit not impossible under “extreme circumstances” (see also Hajek and Goedemans (2003)).

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& Keating, 2001; Fougeron & Keating, 1997; Keating, Cho, Fougeron, & Hsu, 2003, among others). Cho and Jun (2000) suggest two types of domain-initial strengthening effects: (1) syntagmatic contrast enhancement and (2) paradigmatic contrast enhancement. The former refers to the contrast between the initial segment and the following vowel, i.e., the consonant-vowel (CV) contrast at the beginning of a prosodic domain, e.g., an intonational phrase, while the latter deals with the enhancement of a contrastive phonemic distinction such as the singleton/geminate consonant contrast which is the main focus of the current study of KM. Under this account, it is hypothesized that both singleton and geminate consonants for voiced stops and sonorants, for example, can be expected to undergo domain-initial syntagmatic CV contrast enhancement by way of durational lengthening, making these initial segments more distinct from the following vowel. We might also argue that, in utterance-initial position, the KM word-initial singleton/geminate contrast for voiced stops and sonorants, for which there are clear cues to the occlusion phase during voicing/resonance, may also be paradigmatically enhanced in this context as compared to that in utterance-medial position. However, in a related study, Cho and Keating (2009) claim that a consonant contrast may also become less distinctive at higher prosodic domains, suggesting that paradigmatic contrast is not necessarily enhanced domain-initially, but rather it becomes “blurred” at the expense of the syntagmatic CV enhancement. With regard to geminates, Kraehenmann and Lahiri (2008) report that the difference between word-initial singleton and geminate stops in Swiss German weakens rather than strengthens in domain-initial position. They suggest that consonant articulation is strengthened and lengthened within both categories, but the contrast between them is not enhanced. This suggests enhancement of the CV contrast is paramount if there is an equal degree of strengthening and lengthening of the initial singleton and geminate consonant in domain-initial position at higher prosodic levels. 1.5. Research questions for this study As outlined in the literature review presented above, closure duration is considered to be a universal acoustic parameter for consonant gemination. Our first research question pertains to the extent of this acoustic feature in the context of the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in KM: 1. How robust is closure duration in defining the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in KM? It is expected that closure duration will be a highly reliable acoustic property for the consonant contrast in KM, as also observed in many languages with consonant gemination (see Section 1.2), including the closely related language PM. With regard to a position in a prosodic domain (i.e., utterance-initial or utterance-medial positions) and its potential interaction with the singleton/geminate contrast, the second research question asks: 2. To what extent does utterance position affect the closure duration for both singletons and geminates? Given the fact that the singleton/geminate contrast in KM only occurs in word-initial position, we expect that the contrast will be enhanced in utterance-initial position, either syntagmatically or paradigmatically, as predicted by Cho and Jun (2000). For example, if both singletons and geminates are lengthened in utterance-initial position compared to utterance-medial position, we suggest that syntagmatic contrast enhancement may be in operation here. However, if the durational contrast between the two categories is stronger in utterance-initial versus utterance-medial contexts, then we may be dealing with paradigmatic contrast enhancement. There is of course the third option that both paradigmatic and syntagmatic contrast enhancements may be observed if we see lengthening in both singletons and geminates in utterance-initial position but greater lengthening in geminates, for example. Finally, it is important to investigate the extent to which segmental factors are important in determining closure duration in the realization of the KM word-initial singleton/geminate contrast. As noted in Section 1.4, geminate consonants vary according to manner of articulation, voicing and phoneme type. Therefore, it is asked: 3. To what extent do manner of articulation (i.e., stops or sonorants), stop voicing distinctions (i.e., voiceless or voiced stops) and phoneme influence the closure duration differences between word-initial singletons and their geminate counterparts in KM? It is predicted that there will be variation as a result of these segmental and prosodic factors, although we also hypothesize that closure duration will be a consistent and robust acoustic marker for the KM word-initial consonant contrast. We are aware also that concomitant acoustic and articulatory cues are potentially relevant here in the realization of the singleton/geminate contrast. That is, the importance of a single acoustic parameter should ideally be determined through assessing its importance relative to other concomitant acoustic parameters. Nevertheless, this study will make two important contributions to phonetic studies of gemination: (1) It will assess the “reliability” of closure duration as a proxy for the defining property of the contrast regardless of other conditioning factors as mentioned in the second and third research questions above; and (2) it will serve as a strong foundation for further experimental work in KM with regard to other acoustic and articulatory parameters alongside closure duration in defining the wordinitial singleton/geminate contrast in this Malay variety.

2. Method 2.1. Materials and speakers An acoustic phonetic experiment was designed to investigate the robustness of closure duration in defining the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in KM. A list of thirty-eight tokens was prepared consisting of nineteen minimal pairs (shown in Table 3).

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141

Table 3 The KM tokens beginning with singleton consonants (second column) and geminate consonants (fourth column). The glosses are shown next to the tokens. Phoneme pair

/p/–/pp/ /t/–/tt/ /k/–/kk/ /b/–/bb/ /d/–/dd/ /ɡ/–/ɡɡ/ /m/–/mm/ /n/–/nn/ /l/–/ll/ /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/

Singleton

Geminate

Word

Gloss

Word

Gloss

/pitu/ /pagi/ /tido/ /tanɔh/ /kiɣi/ /kabo/ /bini/ /batʃɔ/ /dike/ /dapo/ /gigi/ /gadʒi/ /misa/ /maɣi/ /nikɔh/ /nanɔh/ /lidɔh/ /lapu/ /ŋaŋɔ/

door morning sleep land left blurry wife read song kitchen teeth salary moustache come marriage pus tongue lights open the mouth

/ppitu/ /ppagi/ /ttido/ /ttanɔh/ /kkiɣi/ /kkabo/ /bbini/ /bbatʃɔ/ /ddike/ /ddapo/ /ggigi/ /ggadʒi/ /mmisa/ /mmaɣi/ /nnikɔh/ /nnanɔh/ /llidɔh/ /llapu/ /ŋŋaŋɔ/

at the door early morning sleep by chance outside to the left beetle married is reading sing a song at the kitchen on the teeth sawing tool moustached cupboard married getting pus on the tongue on the lights agape

All tokens were disyllabic words with either C(C)VCV or C(C)VCVC structures. Twenty phonemes were chosen and they were grouped according to voicing profile and manner of articulation: voiceless stops (/p/–/pp/, /t/–/tt/, /k/–/kk/); voiced stops (/b/–/bb/, /d/ –/dd/, /ɡ/–/ɡɡ/); and sonorants (/m/–/mm/, /n/–/nn/, /l/–/ll/, /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/). Each phoneme was followed by two distinct vowels: the high front vowel /i/ and the low central vowel /a/, except /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/ (low back vowel /a/ only). All tokens were high-frequency words and well known to the participants. The target phonemes represent word-initial singletons and geminates in KM that occur across all manners and places of articulation, with the exception of the two glides (i.e., /w/–/ww/ and /j/–/jj/), fricatives and affricates, which are also contrastive in this variety. The participants were sixteen native speakers of KM (8 males, 8 females) whose ages ranged from 20 to 28 (mean age: 22.4). Six of them were students from several universities in Melbourne, Australia, and ten were students from Universiti Malaysia Kelantan located in the state of Kelantan, Malaysia. All were born and raised in Kelantan, Malaysia. 2.2. Data collection For the speakers in Melbourne, the experimental materials were recorded individually in a professional recording studio at the Horwood Language Centre located on the main campus of the University of Melbourne. As for the speakers in Kelantan, they were recorded individually in a quiet room at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan. In all sessions, speakers were asked to repeat each token in two different contexts: (1) in isolation, i.e., utterance-initial position; and (2) in a carrier sentence, i.e., utterance-medial position. In the first context, the target word was preceded by a long silent pause, while in the second context, the target word was preceded by a vowel. The carrier sentence was: /diɔ katɔ (the target word) tiɡɔ kali/ “he said (the target word) three times”. This carrier sentence was adapted from Abramson's (1986) study; the original version was /diɔ katɔ (the target word)/ “he said (the target word)”. We are aware that, although in principle utterance-initial tokens were spoken in isolation, our auditory impressions of the two utterance contexts suggest that speakers were producing laboratory-style speech for both utterance types without undue listing effects or obvious citation-form hyperarticulation. As for the utterance-medial context, we ensured that speakers practised reading the materials without pausing before the experimental tokens. The carrier sentences were not particularly long and auditory analysis by the first author confirmed that speakers were able to produce them fluently. Speakers were also able to repeat utterances if they stumbled or hesitated during the recordings. All experimental tokens were presented in randomized order using a powerpoint presentation on a computer. The carrier sentence was written separately on a piece of A4 paper. Since there is no written counterpart of KM, Standard Malay orthography was used although the speakers were required to produce the KM equivalent. The tokens were presented six times, each time in a different random order. The speakers were reminded to read them at their normal comfortable rate of speech. They were first trained to say a few tokens in succession and to use a natural falling intonation (i.e., declarative intonation in KM). Stress was not controlled in the stimulus set since it is not contrastive in KM (e.g., Karim, 1965), although further experimental work on stress is required to confirm this claim. Both utterance contexts placed the experimental tokens in informational focus so this was not an experimental variable in this study. 228 utterances were recorded from each speaker in both contexts, yielding 7,296 utterances. The experiment took approximately one and a half hours for each speaker. They were compensated financially for their participation in the experiment. 2.3. Annotation criteria The waveform files were digitized at 44.1 kHz, segmented into single utterances for each participant and then coded accordingly. The segmentation and annotation were conducted using Praat version 5.1.11 (Boersma, 2001) in which segmental boundaries were

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determined manually based on visual inspection of simultaneous spectrographic and waveform displays. Following standard segmentation and labeling procedures taken from several studies (e.g., Croot & Taylor, 1995), the annotation criteria for singleton/ geminate tokens beginning with voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants were established. Accurate acoustic annotation of closure duration for voiceless stop tokens in isolated tokens was not possible, i.e., the beginning of closure duration could not be identified since there were no direct acoustic signals during the initial occlusion. In utterance-medial position, the annotation of voiceless stops was possible due to the preceding vowel in the carrier utterance. The interval of voiceless stop occlusion was marked from the offset of regular formant energy of the preceding vowel until the onset of the stop release burst. For voiced stop tokens produced in isolation, the annotation of the closure onset of voiced stops began at the onset of prevoicing during the occlusion phase of the stop; this prevoicing interval was assumed to be a true and reliable measure of utterance-initial closures for voiced stops, as also assumed by Abramson (1998) in his analysis of voiced stops in PM. In utterance-medial position, the closure phase was defined as the interval between the offset of periodicity of the preceding vowel and the offset of the voice bar associated with the consonant. The offset of the voice bar also corresponded to the onset of stop release burst. This latter event was identified when there were clear transients corresponding to the release of the closure. It was characterized by a spike of intense energy on the spectrogram. Some voiced stop tokens had no visible bursts discernible from the spectrogram, i.e., 22% of cases in utterance-initial position and 19% in utterance-medial position. For these tokens, the end of the voiced stop closure was taken as the onset of regular formant activity associated with the following vowel. For sonorant tokens, the utterance-initial closure phases for nasal singletons and geminates were visibly marked on the spectrogram by a lower frequency in the first formant relative to formants in the following vowel. In utterance-medial contexts, the closure phase was identified as the stretches of low amplitude signal in the waveforms between the higher amplitude envelopes of flanking vowels, i.e., there was a marked drop in intensity relative to adjacent segments. As for the lateral, which was also part of the sonorant group examined in this study, the labeling of its closure phase in utterance-initial position was often marked by high periodicity on the waveform. Utterance-medially, the interval of lateral closure was marked more clearly from the onset and offset of the lateral. On the basis of these segmental annotations, four tiers were derived in the Praat TextGrid. As shown in Fig. 1, the four tiers are: (1) the word tier (top tier); (2) the syllable tier (second tier); (3) the phonemic tier (third tier); and (4) the phonetic tier (bottom tier). The word tier (top tier) shows the segmentation and labeling of one of the 38 target words in this experiment (i.e., /ppitu/). The syllable tier (second tier) highlights the syllables in a disyllabic word; ‘s1’ refers to the initial syllable (C(C)V), while ‘s2’ refers to the final syllable (CV(C)). The third represents the phonemic representation of the target word (i.e., /ppitu/), and the surface tier (bottom tier) is the phonetic representation of the target word (i.e., [pːitu]). [h1] and [h2] represent the release portions of the stops [pː] and [t], respectively. Note that closure duration values (described in detail in the following section) were taken for the interval marked as [pː] in the bottom tier in Fig. 1. 2.4. Measurement of closure duration Durational values were extracted using the EMU Speech Database System version 2.3.0 (e.g., Harrington, 2010) and an open source programming language R version 3.3.1 (e.g., Dalgaard, 2008). The Praat TextGrids, shown in Fig. 1, were converted to EMU labels using Convert Tools (i.e., ‘Praat 2 Emu’). Template files were created for individual speakers and data type (i.e., utteranceinitial and utterance-medial tokens). Hierarchies were then automatically built in which the labels on each tier were linked according to their hierarchical relationship within the Hierarchy View. Values of closure duration were extracted and measured via the EMU-R interface using specific measurement points in the hierarchy. The acoustic closure durations were measured in milliseconds (ms) for closure phases for voiceless stops (in utterance-medial position), voiced stops and sonorants. The acoustic closure duration data for utterance-initial voiceless stops were not included in the analysis since annotation was not possible in this environment, as mentioned earlier. The closure durations of voiced stops and sonorants were calculated in both utterance-initial and -medial tokens. A small number of voiced stop tokens beginning with

Fig. 1. Illustration of annotated waveform in the Praat TextGrid for the male speaker, MS8, /ppitu/ “at the door” in utterance-medial position, showing four major annotation tiers (see text for details).

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geminates were fully devoiced during the occlusion in utterance-initial position (2% of the closures) and partly devoiced (i.e., prior to release burst) in utterance-medial position (4% of the tokens). It was uncertain, however, whether there was an initial devoiced section of closure in utterance-initial tokens. Due to this, these particular tokens, all from the same female speaker, were excluded from the closure duration analysis. Ratios were also calculated between geminate and singleton durations for the KM corpus, henceforth called the G/S ratio. The mean G/S ratio was obtained by dividing the mean closure durations of geminate tokens with their singleton counterparts. 2.5. Statistical analyses Separate summary statistics were calculated for G/S ratios for (a) the entire corpus, (b) according to utterance position, (c) manner of articulation and (d) phoneme identity. We also fitted several linear mixed-effects models (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) using the lmerTest package in the statistical environment R (R Development Core Team, 2013; Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2016) to investigate the influence of a range of factors on raw closure duration (ms). The best fit model had three fixed factors: LENGTH (singleton and geminate), POSITION (utterance-initial and utterance-medial) and MANNER (voiceless stop, voiced stop and sonorant) and two fixed effects interactions LENGTH and POSITION, LENGTH and MANNER. A second similar model was fitted substituting PHONEME (which captured phoneme, manner, voicing distinctions but not length) for MANNER to see if there were any additional effects of phoneme type, in addition to manner and voicing, on closure duration (see Section 3.4). In each model, we had random effects for Speaker (16 speakers) with by-slope and intercept calculated with respect to the fixed factors, and for Token (n¼ 38) with a by-slope calculation with respect to position. The inclusion of Speaker as a random factor [i.e., using the lmerTest notation “(LENGTH +POSITION + MANNER∣SPEAKER)” in the model] controlled for individual variation among speakers with regard to potential differences in speech rate and other sources of speaker-specific durational variability (see Appendix for the mixed-effects model formulae). Repetition was not included as a factor in these models as this was shown in earlier iterations not to be a significant factor. Dummy coding was used in the models and baselines for the main model were as follows: LENGTH (singleton), POSITION (utterance-medial), MANNER (sonorant). Significance of fixed effects, which was set at p<0.05, was further verified via model comparison (Piccinini & Arvaniti, 2015). In the overall results section (Section 3.1), we first report summary statistics for G/S ratios (Table 4) and results of the linear mixed-effects model and summary coefficients for each fixed factor (Table 5). Post-hoc Multiple Comparisons of Means using the glht function in R and Tukey tests were also used to investigate any significant interactions between LENGTH and POSITION, LENGTH and MANNER, in the first model, and between LENGTH and POSITION, LENGTH and PHONEME in the second model (both models are included in the Appendix). The summary statistics (i.e., z scores and significance values) presented in Tables 4, 6, 7 and 8 are the results from a series of post-hoc Tukey tests from the overall mixed-effects models. Following the standard shown in R (see also Arnhold (2016)), the significance levels are coded as follows: nnn ¼p<0.001, nn ¼p<0.01, n ¼ p<0.05, . ¼p<0.1. 3. Results 3.1. Overall results The overall closure duration results for singletons and geminates are demonstrated in Fig. 2 and the mean G/S ratio is summarized in Table 4. Note, however, that the data is unbalanced across the two positions since utterance-initial voiceless stop tokens were excluded, given that acoustic closure duration measurement for these was not possible. The boxplots in Fig. 2 show a combined simplified distribution and outliers for closure duration for voiceless stops (utterance-medial position only), voiced stops (all utterance positions) and sonorants (all utterance positions). It is clear from Fig. 2 that there are very different distributions of closure duration values for singletons and geminates. It can be observed that the geminate boxplot (right) is much higher than the singleton plot (left), indicating a clear durational contrast between singletons and geminates, with the closure duration of geminates being almost three times longer than singletons (mean G/S ratio ¼2.73; see Table 4). As evidenced by the clustering of outliers above the upper whisker in the geminate boxplot, there is a noticeably higher standard deviation (SD) value in the geminate duration (42 ms) than is the case for the singleton duration (17 ms), implying greater variability in the production of word-initial geminates. Table 5 summarizes the coefficients of the mixed-effects model for the main effects LENGTH, POSITION, MANNER and interactions. Closure duration varies significantly according to consonant length, utterance position and manner. The results of likelihood ratio tests (using model comparison) confirm the significant interaction between LENGTH and POSITION (χ2 ¼8.2518, p<0.01), i.e., closure duration values are for the most part longer in utterance-medial position (although see Section 3.2 for further discussion). Similarly, model comparison confirms that the interaction between LENGTH and MANNER is significant (χ2 ¼9.5744, p<0.01), i.e., closure duration values are longer for voiceless stops (i.e., measured intervocalically) across singleton and geminate Table 4 Number of tokens, mean closure duration values (ms), standard deviations, a mean G/S ratio and post-hoc Tukey test results for singletons and geminates across the entire corpus. n

Singleton Mean (SD)

n

Geminate Mean (SD)

G/S ratio

z value

Pr( > ˈzˈ)

Sig.

3044

62 (17)

3003

169 (42)

2.73

 10.217

1.71e-14

nnn

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Table 5 Coefficients of the best linear mixed-effects model of consonant closure duration (ms) with fixed factors LENGTH (singleton and geminate), POSITION (utterance-initial and utterancemedial), MANNER (voiceless stop, voiced stop and sonorant) and all interactions. Speaker and Token were random factors.

(Intercept) LENGTH (singleton) POSITION (utterance-medial) MANNER (voiced stop) MANNER (voiceless stop) LENGTH (singleton)nPOSITION (utterance-medial) LENGTH (singleton)nMANNER (voiced stops) LENGTH (singleton)nMANNER (voiceless stop)

Estimate

Std. Error

t value

Pr( > ˈtˈ)

Sig.

157.8280 99.000 14.020 4.757 22.882 11.478 5.231 17.566

9.552 8.777 4.407 3.776 5.416 3.826 5.321 6.1291

16.527 11.280 3.182 1.260 4.225 3.000 0.983 3.341

5.15e-12 1.71e-14 0.00347 0.219775 0.000127 0.006079 0.336151 0.022091

nnn nnn nn nnn nnn n

Table 6 Number of tokens, mean closure duration values (ms), standard deviations, mean G/S ratios and post-hoc Tukey test results for singletons and geminates, excluding voiceless stops, according to utterance position. Utterance position

n

Singleton Mean (SD)

n

Geminate Mean (SD)

G/S ratio

z value

Pr( > ˈzˈ)

Sig.

Utterance-initial Utterance-medial

1220 1248

60 (21) 62 (16)

1200 1227

156 (53) 170 (34)

2.60 2.74

11.709 12.748

0.001 0.001

nnn nnn

Table 7 Number of tokens, mean closure duration values (ms), standard deviations, mean G/S ratios and post-hoc Tukey test results for singletons and geminates according to manner of articulation/voicing and utterance position. The closure duration for voiceless stops was measured in utterance-medial position only. Manner of articulation/voicing

n

Singleton Mean (SD)

n

Geminate Mean (SD)

G/S ratio

z value

Pr( > ˈzˈ)

Sig.

Utterance-initial Voiced stops Sonorants

548 672

61 (23) 59 (18)

528 672

153 (52) 159 (54)

2.51 2.69

 10.439  11.328

0.001 0.001

nnn nnn

Utterance-medial Voiceless stops Voiced stops Sonorants

576 576 672

67 (16) 59 (18) 65 (14)

576 555 672

195 (39) 167 (34) 172 (34)

2.91 2.83 2.65

 13.183  11.134  11.211

0.001 0.001 0.001

nnn nnn nnn

Fig. 2. Distribution of closure duration values (ms) for singletons (left boxplot) and geminates (right boxplot) across the entire corpus. Data are collapsed across voiceless stops (utterancemedial position only), voiced stops (all utterance positions) and sonorants (all utterance positions). The middle box represents the middle 50% of closure duration values for each consonant category, while the dot inside the box marks the median/middle quartile of the data. The upper and lower whiskers represent values outside the middle 50%.

categories (see Section 3.3). There is also a significant interaction between LENGTH and PHONEME (χ2 ¼30.768, p<0.001) in a further model comparison substituting PHONEME for MANNER. A detailed investigation of these effects will be presented in the next three sections, focusing in particular on Utterance Position (Section 3.2), Manner of Articulation/Voicing (Section 3.3) and Phoneme (Section 3.4).

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3.2. Utterance position effects Fig. 3 and Table 6 show summary statistics for closure duration and G/S ratios for voiced stop and sonorant singletons and geminates according to utterance position. Voiceless stop tokens were excluded from this analysis given the absence of acoustic closure duration information in utterance-initial position, as previously noted. It can be seen in Fig. 3 that mean closure duration values are always substantially longer for geminates than for singletons across the board (all p<0.001). The singleton/geminate contrast is maintained and nearly identical in magnitude across utterance positions. Post-hoc Tukey test comparisons show that geminates are longer in utterance-medial position (170 ms) than in utterance-initial position (156 ms) (z ¼4.535, p< 0.001) although the mean difference is relatively small (i.e., 14 ms). As for singletons, there is no statistically significant difference in duration according to utterance position (z ¼0.853, p¼ 0.78). It is important to recall nonetheless that voiceless stops could not be included in the utterance-initial analysis here, which may account for this result. It is also worth remarking that word-initial geminates produced in utterance-initial position are associated with the highest SD value (i.e., 53 ms), pointing to greatest variability for geminate production in utterance-initial position, which was also clearly observed for the distribution of geminate duration values in Fig. 2. More details of the effect of manner of articulation/voicing underlying these results are given in the following section. 3.3. Manner of articulation/voicing effects The distribution of closure duration values as a function of manner of articulation/voicing type and utterance position is demonstrated in Fig. 4. A summary of duration values and G/S ratios are shown in Table 7. It can be observed in Fig. 4 that, for all

Fig. 3. Mean closure duration values (ms) for singletons and geminates according to utterance position: utterance-initial (left) and utterance-medial (right) positions. Voiceless stop tokens were excluded from this analysis.

Fig. 4. Distribution of closure duration values (ms) for singletons and geminates according to manner of articulation/voicing and utterance position; voiceless stops (left), voiced stops (middle) and sonorants (right). Utterance-initial tokens are shown in the upper panel, while utterance-medial tokens in the lower panel. The closure duration for voiceless stops was measured in utterance-medial position only. The middle box represents the middle 50% of closure duration values for each consonant category, while the dot inside the box marks the median/middle quartile of the data. The upper and lower whiskers represent values outside the middle 50%.

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consonant types, the boxplots for geminates are much higher than those for singletons; the mean closure duration values of geminates are always significantly greater (p<0.001) than those of singletons across utterance contexts (see Table 7). As noted earlier in the analysis of main effects, closure duration values are always greatest for voiceless stops across singleton (67 ms) and geminate (195 ms) categories. As shown in Table 7, the highest mean G/S ratio is also found in voiceless stops produced in utterance-medial position (i.e., 2.91). The second largest durational difference in this environment is shown in voiced stops (mean G/ S ratio ¼2.83), and then followed by sonorants (mean G/S ratio ¼ 2.65). In utterance-initial position, the mean G/S ratio is higher for sonorants (2.69) than for voiced stops (2.51). Note also the distributions of outliers for utterance-initial geminates for voiced stops and sonorants in Fig. 4, which are highly clustered in the upper whiskers of the boxplots. As displayed in Table 7, the SD values for utterance-initial geminates for voiced stops (52 ms) and sonorants (54 ms) are both highly variable, resulting in overall heightened variability in that context, as noted in the previous section (see also Fig. 2). Both voiced and sonorant geminates are shorter and more variable (i.e., with higher SD values) in utterance-initial position than those in utterance-medial position, although the contrasts are clearly maintained across both utterance conditions. The following section will now outline the closure duration patterns according to phoneme type within each manner type. 3.4. Phoneme effects The phoneme results within voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants are illustrated in Fig. 5 and summarized in Table 8. The results of post-hoc Tukey tests are also listed in the final three columns. As shown in the boxplots in Fig. 5, substantial closure duration differences between singletons and geminates are consistently realized across all phonemes in both utterance-initial and utterance-medial positions, with geminates showing very long closure durations compared to singletons at all times (all p<0.001). As noted in the analysis of main effects in Section 3.1, mean closure duration values are greatest for utterance-medial /p/ (76 ms) in the singleton category and for utterance-medial /pp/ (205 ms) in the geminate category. In terms of magnitude differences between singletons and geminates, the mean G/S ratios in utterance-initial position vary in the range of 2.29 (/ɡ/–/ɡɡ/) and 3.00 (/l/–/ll/), while in utterance-medial position, the mean G/S ratios are between 2.40 (/ŋ/–/ŋŋ/) and 3.43 (/d/–/dd/). The latter ratio (i.e., 3.43) is the highest across the corpus (see Table 8). This extreme value is due to the high mean duration value for utterance-medial /dd/ (168 ms) combined with a particularly short mean duration value for utterance-medial /d/ (49 ms). Within each consonant group, the highest mean G/S ratios are found in: (a) the utterance-medial alveolar stop /t/–/tt/ (3.18) for voiceless stops; (b) the utterance-medial alveolar stop /d/–/dd/ (3.43) for voiced stops; and (c) the utterance-medial lateral /l/–/ll/ (3.04) for sonorants. With regard to greater variability associated with the production of utterance-initial geminates, as pointed out earlier, the trend is apparent in the current analysis; it can be seen in Table 8 that the SD values are generally high across geminated phonemes in utterance-initial position, particularly for the voiced bilabial stop geminate /bb/ (57 ms) and also the alveolar nasal geminate /nn/ (57 ms). Despite the variation and different distributions of closure duration values, a robust consistent pattern of closure duration in defining the singleton/geminate contrast is evident across all phoneme pairs examined in this study. Overall, we see that the highest G/S ratio values are found in all manner categories for alveolar place of articulation – a reflection in most cases of the low duration values of alveolar singletons.

Fig. 5. Distribution of closure duration values (ms) for singletons and geminates according to phoneme type and utterance position. The phoneme pairs, starting from the leftmost column, are /p/–/pp/, /t/-/tt/, /k/–/kk/, /b/–/bb/, /d/–/dd/, /ɡ/–/ɡɡ/, /m/–/mm/, /n/–/nn/, /l/–/ll/ and /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/. Here, /ng/–/nng/ represent /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/, while ‘S’ singletons and ‘G’ geminates. Utterance-initial tokens are provided in the upper panel, while utterance-medial tokens in the lower panel. The closure durations for voiceless stop pairs (i.e., /p/–/pp/, /t/–/tt/ and /k/–/kk/) were measured in utterance-medial position only. The middle box represents the middle 50% of closure duration values for each consonant category, while the dot inside the box marks the median/middle quartile of the data. The upper and lower whiskers represent values outside the middle 50%.

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Table 8 Number of tokens, mean closure duration values (ms), standard deviations, mean G/S ratios and post-hoc Tukey test results for singletons and geminates according to phoneme type and utterance position. The closure durations for voiceless stop pairs (i.e., /p/–/pp/, /t/–/tt/ and /k/–/kk/) were measured in utterance-medial position only. Phoneme

n

Singleton Mean (SD)

n

Geminate Mean (SD)

G/S ratio

z value

Pr( >ˈzˈ)

Sig.

Utterance-initial /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ /m/ /n/ /l/ /ŋ/

186 182 180 192 192 192 96

60 58 65 57 59 53 67

(21) (21) (26) (18) (18) (17) (18)

181 183 164 192 192 192 96

158 152 149 154 157 159 164

(57) (54) (44) (48) (57) (48) (64)

2.63 2.62 2.29 2.70 2.66 3.00 2.45

8.730 8.430 7.742 8.708 7.747 9.476 7.095

0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001

nnn nnn nnn nnn

Utterance-medial /p/ /t/ /k/ /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ /m/ /n/ /l/ /ŋ/

192 192 192 192 192 192 192 192 192 96

76 62 62 66 49 62 75 59 55 70

(15) (14) (16) (15) (19) (15) (14) (15) (11) (16)

192 192 192 185 184 186 192 192 192 96

205 197 181 176 168 157 181 170 167 168

(34) (41) (39) (32) (35) (33) (33) (36) (31) (36)

2.70 3.18 2.92 2.67 3.43 2.53 2.41 2.88 3.04 2.40

12.778 13.290 11.766 10.824 11.749 7.742 10.472 10.150 11.041 8.151

0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001

nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn nnn

nnn nnn nnn

nnn nnn

4. Discussion In this study, we have presented the results of an acoustic analysis of the typologically rare word-initial consonant contrast in KM with special regard to a durational parameter deemed reliable across languages, i.e., closure duration. The first research question laid out in Section 1.5 asked the degree to which closure duration primarily defines the word-initial contrast in KM. The overall acoustic results presented in Section 3.1 show that the KM singleton/geminate contrast is indeed reflected via very robust durational differences in consonant closure, with all types of geminate consonants (i.e., voiceless stops, voiced stops and sonorants) consistently showing longer closure durations than their singleton counterparts across all contexts where comparisons are possible (voiceless stop tokens were not included in the utterance-initial condition). This finding echoes Abramson's (1987) report for closely related PM: the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast is clearly marked via similar closure duration differences across the two Malay varieties, with geminate consonants always being considerably longer than their singleton counterparts. These findings, taken together, are also consistent with those reported for the 39 languages reviewed in Table 1 in Section 1.2, in the sense that closure duration is indeed a highly reliable acoustic correlate across languages with a singleton/geminate consonant contrast, be it word-medially or in much rarer word-initial position (e.g., Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988; Local & Simpson, 1999; Payne, 2005; Ridouane, 2010, among others). Additionally, differences in closure duration in KM are also found to be robustly implemented across utterance positions, manners of articulation/stop types and phoneme type, as demonstrated from Sections 3.2-3.4, in line with earlier claims that the length distinction based on this parameter is reliably maintained across different contexts (e.g., Muller, 2001). These results also suggest that it is highly likely that the closure duration distinction in KM will be constant across speaking rates, i.e., the singleton/geminate contrast in KM can be primarily characterized by reliable closure duration differences in careful and also in fast speech, as shown in Tarifit Berber (Bouarourou et al., 2011). Such a position is consistent with our own impressionistic evaluation of KM spoken at different rates, although experimental work focusing specifically on the issue of speech rate variation is still required in KM. A comment should also be made about the G/S ratios. The closure duration of word-initial geminates in KM was seen to be extremely long compared to their singleton counterparts (overall G/S ratio ¼2.73). This result is almost similar to Abramson's (1986) finding in PM for which the overall G/S ratio is 2.83 (see Table 2 in Section 1.3), although the limited availability of closure duration data for PM has to be borne in mind. Cross-linguistically, there is a wide range of geminate-to-singleton duration ratios, as previously reviewed in Section 1.3; great care needs to be maintained in interpreting them given the significant differences in methodology including sample size and ratio calculation. Nevertheless, it can be observed that, relative to the languages reviewed and summarized in Table 2 in Section 1.3, KM looks to have a relatively high G/S ratio (i.e., overall G/S ratio of 2.73), coming after Ingrian (2.80; Markus, 2010). That is, the ratio in KM is substantially higher than most ratios reported for other languages with word-medial geminates, e.g., Bengali (1.94; Lahiri & Hankamer, 1988). With reference to word-initial contrast ratios in other languages (Russian, Moroccan Arabic, Cypriot Greek), we can see that ratio values for KM and PM are substantially higher. The fact that the singleton/geminate contrast in these two Malay varieties is only found in word-initial position and never word-medially could be a significant factor here. Recall Goedemans' (1998) argument that extremely long duration may be essential to ensure that word-initial geminates produced in utterance-initial position are audible. Pajak (2009) also argues that higher duration ratios may be perceptually driven, i.e., they are potentially part of speakers’ strategies

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to enhance the perceptibility of utterance-initial geminates that are otherwise less perceptually salient (cf. Kawahara, 2005). Moreover, the extremely high ratio values for KM can possibly be taken as additional evidence of the “marked” status of word-initial geminates, particularly in utterance-initial contexts, as claimed by, e.g., DiCanio (2008) and Dmitrieva (2012). On the subject of possible variation due to utterance position, it was asked in the second research question in Section 1.5 whether the magnitude of contrast between singletons and geminates in terms of closure duration would be affected by this factor. To a certain degree, some of our KM results are antithetical to the prediction in domain-initial strengthening, i.e., the contrast is expected to be larger in utterance-initial position compared to utterance-medial position (e.g., Cho & Jun, 2000). As reviewed in Section 1.4, strengthening can be associated with prosodically strong positions at the edges of the prosodic domains within a prosodic hierarchy (e.g., Cho, 2005; Keating et al., 2003). That is, it is possible that the production of word-initial geminates in utterance-initial position will be further “strengthened” through greater syntagmatic/paradigmatic contrast enhancement. Based on the collapsed data of voiced stops and sonorants only, the degree of durational contrast between singletons and geminates in KM is essentially similar across utterance positions, although there is a slightly larger degree of paradigmatic contrast enhancement in utterance-medial position (mean G/S ratio ¼2.74; see Section 3.2). The slightly yet significantly longer geminate duration value in utterance-medial position (for sonorants and voiced stops) compared to utterance-initial position is unanticipated, given the expected syntagmatic contrast enhancement in domain-initial environments at higher prosodic levels (e.g., Cho, 2001). Moreover, sonorant geminates (especially nasals) are in fact shorter and more variable in utterance-initial versus utterance-medial contexts (see below). If the syntagmatic contrast enhancement is something that underlies this particular finding, we may argue that sonorants have become more consonant-like (to be contrastive with the following vowel), which has an effect of “shortening” the closure duration of sonorants, possibly reducing the singleton/geminate contrast in compensation for the enhanced syntagmatic contrast. Cho and Keating (2001), for Korean, and Fougeron and Keating (1997), for English, also showed that nasal duration was shortened utterance-initially than utterance-medially, supporting this possibility. It is worth noting that the present study examines all target consonants in relatively prominent position (i.e., with informational focus), as mentioned in Section 2.2. In this context, we may speculate that the KM speakers could have possibly placed emphasis on the target consonant in utterance-medial contexts and therefore produced it in a prosodically prominent position, leading to more robust durational contrast in this utterance condition. As shown in Italian and many other languages (Avesani, Vayra, & Zmarich, 2007, Cho & Keating 2009), prominence has an impact on the acoustic duration and the overall kinematic properties of syllables. In addition, boundary effects in the utterance-initial condition may also lead to different patterns, as has been discussed in, e.g., Cho and Keating (2009) and Cho, Lee, and Kim (2014). This speculation, however, requires further experimental confirmation with regard to the effects of focus and prominence on consonant gemination in KM in different prosodic contexts. Bear in mind, however, that our duration result in utterance-initial position is only a function of voiced stop and sonorant closures, i.e., it does not take into account the closure duration of voiceless stops which cannot be measured acoustically in this environment, as emphasized earlier. As to the extent to which closure duration differences between singletons and geminates are also maintained in utterance-initial voiceless stops, this requires other direct articulatory measures using other methods such as fiberscopy or photoglottography (see, e.g., Ridouane, 2003). The final research question in this study also asked whether there would be closure duration differences across manners of articulation, stop types and phoneme types. As reported in Section 3.3, in utterance-initial position, where only voiced stop and sonorant closures are measurable, the highest mean G/S ratio is shown in sonorants (2.69) and then followed by voiced stops (2.51). In utterance-medial position, the mean G/S ratio is highest for voiceless stops (2.91), followed by voiced stops (2.83) and then sonorants (2.65). This latter finding is in contrast to an earlier prediction (e.g., Khattab, 2007) in that the G/S ratio for sonorants is always higher than that for other manners of articulation. In a separate analysis that highlights phoneme differences within manner type (Section 3.4), the voiced alveolar stop pair /d/-/dd/ demonstrates a strikingly high ratio (i.e., 3.43) in which the mean duration value for voiced stop singletons is smallest (49 ms) while the mean duration value for their geminate counterparts is very high (168 ms). This inverse trend has also been shown in several languages such as Japanese (Kawahara, 2005) in which shorter closure duration values in voiced stop singletons are associated with higher duration ratios; Kawahara (2005) argues that this pattern is possibly part of the enhancing strategy to maintain the consonant contrast in Japanese, given aerodynamic difficulties in maintaining voicing during the closures of voiced stop geminates, particularly in utterance-initial position (e.g., Jaeger, 1978; Ohala, 1983; Taylor, 1985), as explained in Section 1.4. Given the very specific place-correlation in KM, it may be more reflective of an articulatory reduction of /d/ that can be associated with the incipient tapping of the voiced alveolar stop (e.g., Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Nevertheless, it is critical to note that, with the exception of only one speaker, voiced stop geminates in KM appear to be fully voiced across utterance positions (as indirectly concluded from the high G/S ratios: utterance-initial ¼ 2.51; utterance-medial ¼2.83), as previously noted in Section 3.3, which is the opposite of Hindi (Ohala & Ohala, 1992), Japanese (Kawahara, 2005) and Tashlhiyt Berber (Ridouane, 2007), in which word-medial voiced stop geminates are considerably devoiced. This observation implies that, in KM, both singletons and geminates appear to have voicing throughout the entire occlusion phase, in which the duration of the voicing is significantly longer in geminates than in singletons in both utterance positions. It is well known that long voiced stops tend to become voiceless given the build-up of sub-glottal pressure and also the expansion of the vocal tract during the stop closure (e.g., Ohala & Riordan, 1979). The voiced stop results in KM, however, show that speakers are able to override articulatory difficulties in maintaining a long utterance-initial voiced occlusion and therefore realize an important consonant contrast in this language. Nevertheless, in the absence of physiological data (e.g., intra-oral pressure), the articulatory mechanisms underlying voiced stop geminates in KM cannot be ascertained at this stage.

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The overall high G/S ratio for sonorants in KM (i.e., utterance-initial ¼ 2.69; utterance-medial ¼ 2.65) support Kawahara's (2007) suggestion that sonorants may not necessarily be impacted upon negatively by a consonant contrast located in word-initial position since they can be considerably prolonged in addition to “internal cues” (p. 31) during closure, i.e., the acoustically measurable and audible differences associated with resonance/voicing. With regard to the behavior of specific manner and phoneme differences within sonorants, there is also considerable internal variation: the results show that the mean G/S ratios for the lateral pair /l/–/ll/ (utterance-initial ¼3.00; utterance-medial ¼ 3.04) are always higher than those for the nasal group, i.e., /m/–/mm/, /n/–/nn/ and /ŋ/–/ŋŋ/ (averaged ratios: utterance-initial ¼2.60; utterance-medial ¼2.56). This finding is due to the mean closure duration values for lateral singletons across utterance contexts (utterance-initial ¼53 ms; utterance-medial ¼55 ms) that are always shorter than those for nasal singletons (averaged values: utterance-initial ¼61 ms; utterance-medial ¼68 ms). However, it remains true that overall G/S ratios for laterals (3.02) and nasals (2.58) are both very high and robust in terms of closure duration differences between singletons and geminates. We have so far highlighted a number of times the larger variability of KM word-initial geminates as compared to their singleton counterparts, which is potentially due to a higher degree of difficulty involved in maintaining longer voicing/resonance in geminates in utterance-initial environments. This variability is also observed in word-medial geminates in Japanese (Hirata & Whiton, 2005) and Italian (Pickett, Blumstein, & Burton, 1999), among others. With regard to the larger variability found particularly in utterance-initial position (Section 3.2), we may argue that, besides the inherent additional articulatory requirements to sustain voicing throughout consonant occlusion for a substantial durational period, this could possibly be due to the flexibility of articulatory timing control in this context. Contrariwise, the smaller variance observed in utterance-medial position may suggest that it is potentially an ideal environment where the word-initial contrast is realized in a more stable manner.

5. Conclusions This study has documented the durational characteristics of relatively rare word-initial geminates in an understudied language, Kelantan Malay. More specifically, it has explored the production of the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in KM in order to evaluate the contribution of closure duration to such a length distinction in this language. Taken together all the closure duration results in KM, it appears that they point to a general trend of high duration ratio values across consonant groups and utterance positions. This situation presumably reflects speakers’ attempts, at least in the case of KM (echoing findings for the related variety PM), to deal with perceptual issues surrounding word-initial consonant gemination. As pointed out by Goedemans (1998), “extreme circumstances”, such as an over-long consonant in syllable onset position, is necessary to make the consonant contrast possible and reliably discernible on the part of the listener (cf. Hajek & Goedemans, 2003). We would argue this is probably most likely the case in languages like KM where the contrast is only word-initial – there are no word-medial congeners that could serve as useful models for listeners. Further, Engstrand and Krull (1994) and Ham (2001) claim that higher ratios can be associated with quantity-based languages (e.g., Finnish: Engstrand & Krull, 1994). At the very least, it may be the case that the duration ratio pattern in KM is, to some degree, similar to those for quantity-based consonant systems in a diverse range of languages. This study also raises a number of pertinent questions that should be addressed in future research. It is clear that there is a need for further articulatory examination in order to determine whether and how the difference in closure duration is maintained in utterance-initial position, particularly in the case of voiceless stops. Such a study would also provide further evidence for the claim that “the primary underlying [singleton/geminate] distinction is one of phonological length, and that fortition is part of the phonetic interpretation of this distinction” (Payne, 2006, p. 2). It has been suggested in the literature that articulatory strengthening may be linked to the singleton/geminate consonant contrast (e.g., Payne, 2006; Ridouane, 2010). These factors should be further explored in order to extend the results of current acoustic analyses in showing that the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in KM may be reflected in, e.g., laryngeal activity. One could also claim that the robust and high closure-duration differences observed across the board in KM may be the result of careful speech; further investigations are required to examine whether closure duration and the accompanying voicing/resonance seen in voiced stops and sonorants in KM are also invariant across different speaking rates and speech styles (i.e., laboratory versus spontaneous speech).

Acknowledgments This study was supported by the Skim Latihan Akademik Bumiputra (SLAB) under the Ministry of Education Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia awarded to the first author. Many thanks go to the staff of the University of Melbourne for their generous assistance during the recording of the Kelantanese speakers in Melbourne. We are also grateful to the management of Universiti Malaysia Kelantan for offering access to their undergraduate students who made the task of data collection enjoyable and rewarding. Finally we would also like to express our gratitude to the reviewers and to the editor for their valuable comments and assistance. All errors remain our own.

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Appendix. Mixed-effects models The best two maximally fit mixed-effects models were applied to the duration (ms) data examined in this paper: The first tested fixed effects and interactions between consonant length, utterance position and manner of articulation, and the second tested fixed effects and interactions between the first two variables and phoneme identity on the singleton/geminate contrast in KM. Model1: Duration  length+position + manner +lengthn manner +lengthn position + ðlength +position +mannerjspeakerÞ+ ðpositionjtokenÞ Model2 : Duration  length+position +phoneme +lengthn phoneme +lengthn position + ðlength +position +phonemejspeaker Þ+ ðpositionjtokenÞ

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