“Fake” gemination in suffixed words and compounds in English and German

Abstract

In languages with an underlying consonantal length contrast, the most salient acoustic cue differentiating singletons and geminates is duration of closure. When concatenation of identical phonemes through affixation or compounding produces "fake" geminates, these may or may not be realized phonetically as true geminates. English and German no longer have a productive length contrast in consonants, but do allow sequences of identical consonants in certain morphological contexts, e.g., suffixation (green-ness; zahl-los "countless") or compounding (pine nut; Schul-leiter "headmaster"). The question is whether such concatenated sequences are produced as geminates and realized acoustically with longer closure duration, and whether this holds in both languages. This issue is investigated here by analyzing the acoustics of native speakers reading suffixed and compound words containing both fake geminate and non-geminate consonants in similar phonological environments. Results indicate that the closure duration is consistently nearly twice as long for fake geminates across conditions. In addition, voice onset time is proportionally longer for fake geminates in English while vowel duration shows few significant differences (in German sonorants only). These results suggest that English and German speakers articulate fake geminates with acoustic characteristics similar to those found in languages with an underlying length contrast, despite no longer displaying the contrast morpheme-internally.

How morphological structure affects phonetic realisation in English compound nouns

“…The control variables showed the expected effect of speech rate, as well as the expected variation between different consonants: higher speech rate led to shorter consonants, the fricative was longer than the nasals, and /m/ was longer than /n/. In addition, we found clear evidence of morphological gemination, with double consonants approximately twice as long as singletons across speech rates; this finding is in line with other studies on double consonants that straddle morphological boundaries (Ben Hedia 2019; Ben Hedia and Plag 2017; Kotzor et al 2016;Plag and Ben Hedia 2018). We also found some evidence of word-initial consonant lengthening, since N2-initial consonants were slightly longer than those in N1-final position (cf.…”

Articulatory dynamics of (de)gemination in Dutch

“…We must, however, note that while we arrive at essentially the same symbolic representation, Dutch still stands in contrast to Berber or English, in the sense that the temporal effect of gemination is very limited. There is no lengthening in fake geminate /r/ compared to singleton onset in our study, whereas for fricatives, Martens & Quené (1994) (Ridouane, 2010;Oh & Redford, 2012;Kotzor et al, 2016).…”

“…However, languages vary in the extent to which fake geminates behave phonetically like lexical geminates. At one end of the spectrum, English and German do not have lexical gemination, but fake geminates are phonetically long (Oh & Redford, 2012;Kotzor et al, 2016). In contrast, Dutch is reported to prohibit long consonants, including those derived by external sandhi.…”

The Role of Perception in the Typology of Geminate Consonants: Effects of Manner of Articulation, Segmental Environment, Position, and Stress

“…Russian and Italian geminate inventories include both sonorants and obstruents (e.g., Russian /vanna/ 'bathtub', /gruppa/ 'group'). In American English, consonant duration is not used phonemically, although phonetic lengthening at the junction of identical consonants is observed with suffixation and compounding (Kotzor, Molineaux, Banks, & Lahiri, 2016).…”