15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Surface Palatalization of Polish Bilabial Stops: Articulation and Acoustics

Bernd Pompino-Marschall (1), Marzena Zygis (2)

(1) Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
(2) Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Germany

Bilabial stops undergoing Surface Palatalization (SP) were analyzed in an EMMA/EPG study. Articulatorily, the point of maximal palatal contact and the labial opening movement were analyzed. The acoustic analysis pertained to stop related timing and the point of the highest F2-value. Results show (i) that SP yields a higher F2 at vowel onset and a lengthened opening gesture and (ii) that morpheme-induced palatalizations are distinguished from word initial ones and sandhi-palatalizations articulatorily and acoustically by a shorter delay of palatal target position with respect to stop production; (iii) no differences are found between 'repalatalized' and plain segments in case of sandhi palatalization.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Pompino-Marschall, Bernd / Zygis, Marzena (2003): "Surface palatalization of Polish bilabial stops: articulation and acoustics", In ICPhS-15, 1751-1754.