14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
Previous research has provided sufficient evidence that locus
equations are a good predictor of place of articulation. They
permit to classify stops unambiguously according to place of
articulation in various languages including English, Spanish
and Arabic.
Sussman et al. investigated the validity of locus
equations in English for syllable positions other than initial.
Likewise, the present study explores the case of Catalan, a
Romance language which has non-aspirated stops, both at the
syllabic onset and coda. In word-final position, stops take the
voicing characteristics of the following consonant (we put the
words in a context that allowed the appearance of both voiced
and voiceless final stops).
We analysed the validity of locus equations for stops
at both word-initial and word-final positions. Four measures of
comparison have been taken into account: slope, y-intercept, R2
and SE. For the slope and the y-intercept we can state that there
are highly significant differences among the three places of
articulation in both positions: onset and coda. Within each stop,
only labials showed significant differences between syllabic
onset and coda. Contrary to Sussman's results, there are no
differences for any place of articulation for R2 and SE between
onset and coda. Probably, this is due to the differences in the
realization of English and Catalan stops, as Catalan stops are
produced with the approximately the same articulatory
precision in both positions.
Bibliographic reference. Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio / Matas-Crespo, Josep / Ortega-Escandell, Alicia (1999): "Locus equations and place of articulation of Catalan stops as a function of syllabic position", In ICPhS-14, 2133-2136.