Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters that obey the SSP. One problem with studies that have compared the acquisition of SSP-obeying and SSP-violating clusters is that the component sounds in the two types of sequences were different. This paper examines the acquisition of initial /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences by sixty Greek children aged 2 through 5 years. Results showed greater accuracy for the /s/-stop relative to the stop-/s/ sequences, but no difference in accuracy between / ts/, which is usually analyzed as an affricate in Greek, and the other stop-/s/ sequences. Moreover, errors for the /s/-stop sequences and /ts/ primarily involved stop substitutions, whereas errors for / ps/ and /ks/ were more variable and often involved fricative substitutions, a pattern which may have a perceptual explanation. Finally, /ts/ showed a distinct temporal pattern relative to the stop-/ s/ clusters /ps/ and /ks/, similarly to what has been reported for productions of Greek adults.

This study examined the phonetic realization of voiced stops in the Cretan and Thessalonikan dialects of Modern Greek. Six males and six females of each dialect were recorded in a sentencereading task. Duration and amplitude were measured to compare the degree of nasality of voiced stops to that of nasals in different phonetic contexts. Results showed that amplitude changes during the voicing bar of the voiced stops varied both within and across speakers. In some instances, there was consistently low amplitude throughout the voicing bar (characteristic of voiced stops), whereas in other instances, there was high amplitude at the closure onset followed by decreasing amplitude toward the burst (characteristic of prenasalization). By contrast, nasals had consistently high amplitude throughout the murmur. The mixed-effects models suggest that there were complex and interactive influences of dialect, gender, prosodic position, and stress in realizing prenasality in the voiced stops. In particular, Cretan male speakers showed the least clear tendency of prenasalization consistent with earlier impressionistic studies. Furthermore, productions of Cretan males showed less prenasalization than those of females in both prosodic positions. The procedures in this study can be used to describe prenasalization in other dialects or languages where prenasalization has been observed.

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Initial /s/-stop clusters occur frequently in the world’s languages, but initial stop-/s/ clusters are relatively infrequent. Furthermore, there appear to be no languages that contain initial stop-/s/ clusters, but not /s/-stop clusters, while the reverse is not true [Morelli, (1999) and (2003)]. This study aims at uncovering a perceptual explanation for these patterns by examining the salience of initial /s/-stop and stop-/s/ clusters in Greek, where both sequences are common. Twenty naïve Greek adult listeners identified syllables beginning with /sp/, /st/, /sk/, /ps/, /ts/, or /ks/, in two vowel contexts, /a/ and /i/, in real words spoken by ten Greek adult native speakers. The syllables were mixed with parts of Greek multitalker babble using SNRs of −6, 0, and +6 dB and presented to listeners for identification. Results showed significantly poorer identification for the /ps/ and /ks/ clusters than the /ts/ and /s/-stop clusters, particularly in the −6 and 0 SNRS. There was also a significant interaction with vowel, such that /sk/ and /ts/ were identified more accurately before /a/, whereas /ks/ was identified more accurately before /i/. The implications of these findings for phonological acquisition and speech perception are considered. [Work supported by NIDCD 02932 and NSF Grant 0729140.]

Greek is one of the few languages to allow /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences at three places of articulation (bilabial, dental, and velar) in word-initial position. This study measured the coarticulation of /s/ with the following or preceding stop in native Greek-speaking children’s and adults’ productions of real words beginning with /sp/, /st/, /sk/, /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/, in a variety of vowel contexts. The aim was to determine whether stop place cues are signaled effectively in the spectrum of adjacent /s/ in both types of consonant sequences attested in Greek. Fast Fourier transform spectra were calculated for overlapping 10-ms windows from the beginning to the end of fricative noise and spectral moments were computed in each window. Systematic differences in the fricative spectra as a function of the adjacent stop consonant were observed in the /s/+stop sequence (as in English) and also in the stop+/s/ sequence (where the differences in the portion after the stop burst proper mirrored the patterns at the end of the fricative in the clusters in the other order). Coarticulation was comparable across age groups, although there was greater variability in children’s productions. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. R01DC02932 and NSF Grant No. BCS-0729140.]