Studies in Articulatory Phonology (
Cross-linguistically, underlying consonant clusters, particularly in loanwords, often surface with a vowel sound separating the two consonants. In its most familiar form, this vowel sound corresponds to an
To provide an example, epenthesis of a high vowel occurs in Turkish to repair illegal consonant clusters in codas. These illegal clusters have rising or flat sonority, and occur in Arabic loanwords (
(1) | Coda-repair in Turkish (consonant cluster is bolded, inserted vowels are in italics) | ||||
Root | Nominative | Accusative | Gloss | ||
a. | /sɑ |
[sɑ.' |
[sɑ |
‘patience’ | |
b. | /dʒe |
[dʒe.' |
[dʒe |
‘algebra’ | |
c. | /bu |
[bu.' |
[bu |
‘nose’ | |
d. | /ø |
[ø.' |
[ø |
‘life’ |
The inserted vowel in illegal coda clusters forms the nucleus of a syllable and allows the final consonant to be syllabified as a simple coda. Turkish stress placement is generally word-final, and like underlying vowels, inserted vowels in coda clusters receive stress when they occur in the final syllable. Coda-repairing vowels are also subject to vowel harmony. The Turkish vowel inventory contains eight phonemes distinguished by [±high], [±back], and [±round]; all three features are relevant to harmony, which affects most suffix vowels. The backness of harmonizing vowels in Turkish is determined by rightward spreading from the nearest vowel in the root. The nearest root vowel also determines the roundness of high harmonizing vowels. Low vowels may trigger rounding harmony but are not targets for it. This harmony process can be seen in the variable realization of the accusative suffix in (1): [ɯ] following /a/, [i] following /e/, and [y] following /ø/. Like the accusative suffix, the inserted vowels in the nominative forms take their backness and rounding from the adjacent root vowel, which indicates that they are targets for vowel harmony. Since the Turkish coda-repairing vowel participates in syllabification, stress-assignment, and vowel harmony, it has to be a phonological object. Thus, it must be epenthetic—a segment inserted during phonology, and mapped to a gesture during articulation.
However, an added vowel sound at the surface does not always correspond to an inserted phonological segment with an accompanying gesture. Studies in Articulatory Phonology (
Intrusive vowels contrast with lexical and epenthetic vowels phonologically, gesturally, and acoustically. Phonologically, intrusive vowels have no corresponding segment, so they cannot participate in phonological processes that target segments, such as vowel harmony and syllabification. Because intrusion does not result in a new vocalic segment, it does not alter syllable structure, and cannot be taken as repair of illegal syllable structures. When vowel intrusion occurs between two consonants, the two consonant gestures are still coordinated with each other. For instance, if vowel epenthesis occurs in complex codas, the maximal syllable for the language might be CVC. But if vowel
Hall (
Gesturally, intrusive vowels lack corresponding gestures and targets, so they differ articulatorily from phonologically present vowels. Figures
Gestural score for epenthesis.
Gestural scores for vowel intrusion.
In contrast, when intrusion occurs, no segment is inserted in phonology, and no gesture is added in articulation, but the relative timing of the /C/ and /r/ gestures produces the percept of an intervening vowel <v> (Figure
Experiments have exploited these articulatory differences to distinguish intrusive and epenthetic inserted vowels. For example, the intrusive schwas that break up illegal onset clusters like /zg/ in English are gesturally closer to /sk/ than to /sək/ (
Acoustically, since intrusive vowels have no durational target, they are typically shorter than lexical vowels. In addition, since intrusive vowels have no gestural target, their formant values are more affected by coarticulation. Hall and Sue (
Cross-linguistically, intrusive vowels typically occur across sonorants, share the quality of the vowel that is adjacent across the sonorant, do not contribute a syllable, and are sensitive to speech rate (
(2) | Onset-repairing vowel insertion in Turkish (from |
|||
a. | / |
[p<i>rens] | ‘prince’ | |
b. | / |
[p<u>rova] | ‘test’ | |
c. | / |
[b<ɯ>randa] | ‘canvas’ | |
d. | / |
[b<u>luʒin]~[b<y>lyʒin] | ‘blue jeans’ |
The onset-repairing vowels in these examples are invited by a stop+liquid cluster, and their quality is affected by the vowels that are adjacent over the liquid. Onset-repairing vowels can be absent in careful speech (
However, previous treatments of Turkish complex onset repair characterize it as the mirror image of complex coda repair. Both non-lexical vowels are described as epenthetic and harmonizing with the neighboring vowel (
This paper presents an acoustic production experiment on Turkish onset cluster repair. The results support the hypothesis that vowels in Turkish onset clusters are intrusive, not epenthetic. The duration of the interconsonantal interval (ICI) in Turkish onset clusters is found to have a unimodal distribution, suggesting that the acoustic insertion is a gradient phenomenon, not an optional, categorical process. Moreover, acoustic non-lexical vowels are found to be shorter and more affected by co-articulation with the following vowel than their underlying counterparts. Finally, the formant values of the acoustic inserted vowels in this experiment were generally similar to those of [ɯ], even when vowel harmony would demand [i] or [u]. These results support an interpretation of Turkish onset repair as a gradient gestural phenomenon, in which the release of the initial consonant in the cluster contributes a schwa-like acoustic vowel.
This study contributes in three areas. First, it provides new, controlled Turkish data, by collecting repeated productions by multiple speakers of methodically chosen near minimal sets of words. Second, it probes the phonological status of the Turkish onset-repairing vowel, thereby testing the validity of phonological arguments that have been made on the basis of its behavior. Onset cluster repair is significant for our understanding of both syllable structure and vowel harmony in Turkish. If onset repair is not phonological, then traditional characterization of Turkish syllable structure as maximally CVC(C) needs to be revised, at least for loanwords. In addition, onset cluster repair provides the only counter-evidence to the traditional claim that harmony in Turkish is strictly left to right. If onset repair actually occurs outside of categorical phonology, then it is not actually relevant to harmony. Finally, this study expands the knowledge-base for vowel intrusion by supplying phonetic detail about intrusive vowels that are unusual because they occur in onset clusters (rather than coda clusters), and in a language with vowel harmony.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 summarizes previous work on onset cluster repair in Turkish. The design of an acoustic production study is presented in Section 3, and its results in Section 4. Section 5 discusses and concludes.
In Clements and Sezer’s (
Experimental data on Turkish onset cluster repair comes from Yavaş (
To supplement these studies, I conducted a corpus study in the Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon (TELL;
Across all cluster types, by far the most commonly transcribed non-lexical vowel in TELL is [ɯ]. Non-lexical front vowels were transcribed in only 31% of the cases where a lexical front vowel trigger was available, contrary to the 100% application of backness harmony reported in Kaun (
Although prior work largely describes onset cluster repair in Turkish as epenthesis accompanied by vowel harmony, it also reveals differences between onset cluster repair and other epenthesis and harmony in Turkish. Vowel insertion in onset clusters is variable (
One possible problem with interpreting onset cluster repair in Turkish as vowel intrusion is that vowel insertion is reported even in clusters containing two obstruents, particularly in Yavaş (
To address the lack of data on acoustic detail, intraspeaker variation, and the effect of the surrounding context on onset cluster repair in Turkish, I conducted a production study. The experiment is designed to: (1) establish whether apparent insertion in Turkish is a gradient or a categorical process, by examining the duration of the interval between C and /r/; (2) determine the rate of acoustic insertion in onset clusters and the degree to which frontness or rounding spreads to the inserted vowel; (3) look for acoustic differences between lexical and non-lexical vowels. The experiment had a 2 by 3 by 3 by 2 design. The primary factor manipulated was the underlying syllable structure of the target word: beginning with a stop+/r/ onset cluster (/Cr/), or beginning with a simple onset followed by an underlying vowel and /r/ (/Cvr/). The /Cvr/ words were included as controls so that non-lexical vowels in /Cr/ words could be compared to lexical vowels. Although vowel insertion is also reported to occur in other clusters (including /s/+stop, obstruent+/l/), /Cr/ clusters were chosen for the experiment because insertion is transcribed at a higher rate in /Cr/ clusters (71% in TELL) than in /sC/ clusters (42% in TELL). In addition, surface harmonic effects resulting from vowel overlap are more likely to occur across a sonorant like Turkish /r/ (phonetically a tap) than across a stop (
To ensure that the findings extend across all consonant and vowel places, and investigate claims of vowel harmony in the inserted vowel, three stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /g/—voiced stops were chosen to avoid aspiration) and three vowels (/i/, /a/, /o/)
A list of real and nonce words beginning with stop+/r/ clusters was constructed (Table
Stimuli. Unglossed items are nonce words. An asterisk following a word indicates that it is also being used as a /CVr/ match for a /Cr/ word in the real word condition, since no appropriately shaped real word could be found. Familiarity ratings for real /Cr/ words are shown in parentheses.
C1 | V2 | Experimental | Control | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Real /Cr/ |
Nonce /Cr/ | v1 = <ɯ> | v1 ≠ <ɯ> | |||
b | /i/ | bri.fing (4) ‘briefing’ | bri.mi.ti | bɯ.ri.pis | bi.ri.m-in ‘unit.your’ |
|
/a/ | bran.ʃ-ɯ (4.33) ‘subject.ACC’ | brat.ʧi.ten | bɯ.ran.dʒɯ* | – | ||
/o/ | bro.ʃyr (4.67) ‘brochure’ | bro.ʒør.le | bɯ.ro.ʒyn* | bu.ro.ʧyp* | ||
d | /i/ | drip.ling (1) ‘dribbling’ | drip.li.ke | dɯ.rib.le* | di.rim.-ler ‘life.PL’ |
|
/a/ | dra.ma (4) ‘drama’ |
dra.fa | dɯ.rap* | – | ||
/o/ |
bor.dro-m (4) ‘payroll.my’ | lor.dro.pur | gar.dɯ.rop ‘wardrobe’ | nor.du.rof* | ||
g | /i/ | grip (5) ‘influenza’ | gri.vi | gɯ.rif* | gi.rim ‘penetration’ |
|
/a/ | gram (5) ‘gram’ | gra.bɯ | gɯ.rap* | – | ||
/o/ | gro.s-u (2.67) ‘gross.ACC’ | gro.dol | gɯ.ron* | gu.rot* |
Real /Cr/ words were chosen to be familiar, where possible. Familiarity was determined on the basis of a familiarity-rating survey conducted with three native speakers of Turkish (1 female, 2 male; ages 28–63), who did not participate in the experiment otherwise. Participants were asked to rate the familiarity of the words on a five-point scale, where 1 meant “I don’t know this word at all” and 5 meant “I use this word regularly or learned it as a young child.” Instructions were presented in Turkish. A word was considered familiar if it received an average rating of at least 4 on the survey, with no participant giving it a rating of 1 or 2. Unfortunately, in the /dri-/ and /gro-/ conditions, no sufficiently familiar Turkish word was found, so the highest-rated available word was selected even though ratings were quite low (1 for
Control words of the form /CVrV/ were created for every condition (Table
While [ɯ-a] sequences are harmonic for both backness and rounding, [ɯ-i] sequences are disharmonic for backness, and [ɯ-o] sequences, for rounding. These disharmonic sequences are unattested as underlying sequences (except for
Stimuli are shown in Table
In addition, 17 fillers (Table
Fillers.
C1 | V = /e/ | V2 = /u, o/ | V = /a/ |
---|---|---|---|
Labial | merimit (nonce) |
provizjon ‘commission’ | marɯp (nonce) |
Coronal | negatif ‘negative’ |
tuvalet ‘toilet’ |
tablo ‘painting’ |
Dorsal | kervan ‘caravan’ |
kuafør ‘hair dresser’ | kakao ‘cocoa’ |
Both target and filler words were presented in the carrier sentence in (3), which includes slots for two target words. The sentence was designed to elicit contrastive focus on the target words, to further enhance the carefulness of the elicited speech.
(3)
Bana
me.DAT
X deme,
X say.NEG,
bana
me.DAT
Y de.
Y say.
“Don’t say X to me, say Y to me.”
Since the structure of the carrier sentence elicits an expectation of structural parallelism (that X and Y will be of the same grammatical category and case), X~Y pairs with the same case were selected. Also, within a given sentence, X and Y were either both nonce or both real. To control for the possibility that prosodic factors would create a confounding difference in articulation between X and Y, half the repetitions employed an X-Y order, and the other half employed a Y-X order.
Six native speakers of Turkish (3 female: S4, S5, S7) were recruited from the University of California at Santa Cruz community. (A seventh [S1] participated in the pilot experiment, after which the design was significantly revised, so her data are not discussed.) S3 is bilingual in French and Turkish, so language effects may complicate the interpretation of his data. S6 lived in New Jersey, USA, for a year (age 4–5), but in Turkey otherwise. The remaining speakers all studied English in school during adolescence, but lived in Turkey, using Turkish as their primary language at home and work, until age 18 or later. Participants were paid $20 for their time.
A consent form was provided in English. A language background questionnaire and experimental instructions were provided in Turkish. Participants were told that the purpose of the experiment was to study the way Turkish speakers pronounce words. Recordings were made in a sound-attentuated booth using a shotgun microphone with a USB pre-amplifier. Subjects were asked to practice reading the instructions to get comfortable speaking with the equipment, and were instructed to start the sentence over if they felt they had made a mistake. The experimenter also intervened when disfluencies or errors were noticed. Participants were requested to speak carefully and enunciate clearly, as if they were announcers on TRT (Turkish Radio and Television), whose broadcasters’ careful articulation is famous in Turkey.
Stimuli were presented to subjects on a laptop screen, with the target words already embedded in the carrier sentences. One sentence was visible at a time. Participants read through a list of 27 sentences (each containing up to two target words) five times. Within the list, all sentences were randomized together, without any blocking of real vs. nonce words. After each reading of the sentence list, participants were offered the chance to take a break. At the end of the experiment, participants filled out a debriefing form with questions provided in Turkish as well as English. Responses indicated that participants had not identified the research question being investigated.
Acoustic annotation of the v1 interval was conducted in Praat (
/Cvr/ token with an underlying vowel (from S3).
/Cr/ token containing an acoustic non-lexical vowel (from S4).
/Cr/ token with no acoustic insertion (from S3).
Measurements of F1 and F2 were taken at the midpoint of v1 using a Praat script, and converted from Hertz to Bark using the formula from Traunmüller (
No differences were found between real/familiar words and nonce words, so real and nonce words are treated together throughout the analysis. Acoustic analysis reported in this section finds that onset cluster repair is variable and gradient (Section 4.1). Non-lexical vowels tend to be acoustically [ɯ]-like, rather than conforming to vowel harmony (Section 4.2). However, non-lexical vowels display significant differences in duration, F1, and F2 from both harmonic lexical vowels (Sections 4.3–4.4) and from lexical /ɯ/ (Section 4.5).
Vowel intrusion results from gradient gestural alignment, so if onset cluster repair is vowel intrusion, ICI durations are predicted to have a unimodal distribution of durations. On the other hand, vowel epenthesis reflects a categorical insertion process, so if onset cluster repair is optional epenthesis, as traditionally described, ICI durations are predicted to have a bimodal distribution (one mode for insertion and one mode for no insertion).
Using R (
Duration of ICI and of v1.
For purposes of comparing acoustic non-lexical vowels to lexical vowels, a vowel-duration threshold (shown in red in Figure
Acoustic insertion in onset clusters by subject.
Using R (
Vowel plots. Non-lexical vowels are plotted as open circles.
Consistent with Kiliç and Öğüt’s (
If the non-lexical vowels are intrusive, as hypothesized here, they will lack the durational and gestural targets associated with true vowels, and are predicted to be shorter and more subject to coarticulation than lexical vowels. According to the standard epenthetic theory of onset-cluster repair in Turkish, non-lexical vowels are subject to backness and rounding harmony. For purposes of testing that hypothesis, I treat the non-lexical vowels accordingly: as <i> before /i/, <ɯ> before /a/, and <u> before /o/ (cf.
Linear mixed effects models of duration, F1, and F2 were computed using R (
Three separate measures of duration were analyzed: the duration of the whole interconsonantal interval, the vocalic portion of the ICI, and the burst combined with any additional positive VOT. For all measures, models that included v1’s lexical status performed better than models that did not in maximum likelihood ratio tests (all
In the best model of ICI duration (
Interaction of lexical status and v1 category for three different measures of duration. Each line is a different v1 category.
In addition, though less relevant to the hypotheses of this paper, the ICI is longer before /i/ than before /a/ (β = 11.20,
Analysis of v1, the portion of the ICI that has high amplitude periodicity with formant structure, again found significant main and interaction effects of lexical status (
In the analysis of the duration of the consonant burst plus any additional positive VOT (
The hypothesis that non-lexical vowels are intrusive also predicts differences in their formant values. Formant values were measured at the midpoint of the high amplitude portion of the ICI with periodicity and formant structure. The best model of F1 (
The model shows the expected main effects of surrounding context: F1 is significantly lower for /i/ (β = –56.47 Hz,
The best model of F2 (
As expected, though less relevant to the hypotheses of this paper, the model also shows that F2 is higher in /i/ than /ɯ/ (β = 393.70 Hz,
The models above found significant differences between non-lexical vowels and harmonic lexical vowels in the same context. However, as discussed above, some previous experiments suggest that rounding harmony in onset cluster repair may only be triggered by high vowels (
Logically, the differences between lexical and non-lexical vowels reported above could also result from epenthesis applying but harmony not applying, in which case all epenthetic vowels would be [ɯ]. To address this possibility, non-lexical vowels were again recoded, this time treating all of them as <ɯ>, and the analyses above were repeated. Data was subsetted to exclude /i/ and /u/, since these were no longer relevant.
The best model of F1 assuming no harmony (
Less relevantly, the model also shows main effects of a preceding /g/ (β = –20.49,
The best harmony-free model of F2 (
Model comparison found that the lexical status of v1 significantly improved model performance for duration, F1, and F2. Non-lexical vowels are shorter than their underlying counterparts, a result predicted if non-lexical vowels are not true vowels, only the acoustic consequence of an open transition between consonant gestures, which has no durational or acoustic target. In addition, non-lexical vowels are acoustically intermediate between the harmonizing vowels /i/ and /u/ and the non-harmonizing /ɯ/ in their F1 (Figure
Effect of lexical status on F1. Non-overlapping notches indicate significant differences in group medians.
Effect of lexical status on F2. Non-overlapping notches indicate significant differences in group medians.
The differences between lexical and non-lexical vowels are particularly clear before /i/, where non-lexical vowels had higher F1 and lower F2 than lexical /i/, but lower F1 and higher F2 than lexical /ɯ/ (Figures
This paper has presented acoustic evidence that the non-lexical vowels in underlying onset clusters in Turkish result from gradient, gestural intrusion, and consequently lack durational and gestural targets. In the production experiment, 88% of underlying onset clusters in Turkish are produced with an acoustic inserted vowel. Though this high rate of acoustic insertion is contrary to Clements and Sezer’s (
The quality of non-lexical vowels also seems to be gradiently determined by the surrounding gestural context. Non-lexical vowels are acoustically intermediate between harmonizing and non-harmonizing lexical vowels, with F1 and F2 differences being most significant before /i/. These acoustic differences show that the vowels appearing in onset clusters are definitely not participating in backness harmony. This implies they are not participating in rounding harmony, either, although the acoustic differences between lexical /u/ and the non-lexical vowels did not reach significance.
To summarize, vowel intrusion does not completely neutralize the distinction between /CC/ and /CVC/ in Turkish. Rather, the non-lexical vowels in Turkish onset clusters are shorter than lexical vowels; are more affected by the surrounding context; and do not participate in vowel harmony. Moreover, the Turkish lexicon lacks the structures that would be created if the intrusive vowel were taken to be true inserted [ɯ] (i.e., forms containing underlying disharmonic sequences [ɯ i] and [ɯ o]—see Section 3.1), suggesting that the Turkish grammar actually rules out such sequences. These observations argue that non-lexical vowels in Turkish onset clusters are intrusive vowels. Lacking their own gestural targets, the acoustics of these intrusive vowels are determined by their context. There is no insertion of a vowel gesture even in clusters that are produced with an acoustic vowel between the two consonants; instead, this intrusive vowel represents a period when the closure of the first consonant has been released but the closure of the second consonant has not been completed. Meanwhile, the tongue body is already moving toward the following vowel’s target, such that the formant values during the ICI are shaped by that target.
This interpretation is readily represented in an Articulatory Phonology (
Although the gestural coordination that produces intrusive vowels seems to be grammaticized in some languages (
If onset cluster repairing vowels arise from gestural timing relations, rather than being epenthetic, then their behavior should not be used as the basis for arguments about the segmental phonology of Turkish, particularly vowel harmony. An intrusive vowel cannot be a target for phonological harmony since it is not a phonological object. This suggests that the reasoning behind studies like Kaun (
In addition, the non-harmonizing behavior of the inserted vowel cannot be used to bolster the traditional understanding of vowel-harmony in Turkish as a strictly left-to-right process (e.g.,
The phonological status of the vowels in Turkish onset clusters is also relevant to our understanding of Turkish syllable structure. If the onset-repairing vowel is not epenthetic, then there is no categorical prohibition of complex onsets in the foreign stratum of Turkish phonology. Rather, gestural timing relations create the percept of a vowel in a sequence that, phonologically speaking, remains a complex onset. Future work could test this claim by probing Turkish speakers’ mental representations of onset clusters with a syllable-counting task, or by examining text-setting of these non-lexical vowels in music.
Given that all onset clusters in Turkish come from loanwords, an anonymous reviewer asks whether it might be the case that the Turkish phonological grammar originally prohibited onset clusters and repaired them with epenthesis, and has changed (or is changing) to permit onset clusters, even if they are realized with an open transition between the consonants. We can also consider the possibility that the transition went in the opposite direction, from initially attempting to produce borrowed onset clusters with a foreign-like gestural coordination, to later producing intrusive vowels, and finally toward reanalyzing the intrusive vowels as epenthetic and integrating the loanwords into the native phonological grammar, which prohibits onset clusters. A full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, but I would like to propose that both scenarios played out in different segments of the population. It seems likely that there has always been variation in Turkish speakers’ realization and representation of onset clusters in loanwords, based on individuals’ degree of exposure to the source languages. Post-hoc examination of the inter-speaker variation in this experiment provides tentative support for this: Synchronically, the degree of exposure to languages with onset clusters seemed to predict the degree to which clusters contrasted with /CVC/ sequences. Speakers roughly fall into three groups: categorical differentiators, gradient differentiators, and neutralizers, echoing the pattern in Hall (
First, speakers who are experienced with languages like French or English are likely to be aware that <CC> spellings represent underlying clusters. Such speakers are more likely to succeed in producing CC gestural sequence with a close transition, as in French or English consonant clusters. In this study, S3 and S6 had early exposure to languages with onset clusters, and insert acoustic vowels less frequently than the other speakers (S2, 4, 5, 7). These early bilinguals also have bimodal distributions of ICI durations. Diachronically, when these /CC/ loanwords originally entered Turkish from prestige languages like French, they were probably used by bilinguals who were highly conscious of their status as loanwords, and (variably) able to achieve a foreign-like gestural coordination. These bilinguals may even have been code-switching, and would have been aware that the borrowings began with /CC/, not /CVC/.
Second, hearing /CC/ loanwords in the speech of bilinguals, other speakers with less foreign language experience may recognize the underlying clusters, but fail to achieve a foreign-like gestural timing. This situation is comparable to English speakers producing illegal onset clusters in Shaw & Davidson (
Third, the presence of acoustic intrusive vowels in some tokens of complex onsets could result in some speakers reanalyzing the borrowed words as /CVC/. This occurred in the transcription task in Davidson (
Listeners who interpret the acoustic vowels they have heard as underlying vowels would not differentiate lexical and non-lexical vowels in their speech, either. This appears to describe the one monolingual speaker in this study, S4, and, to a lesser extent, her husband S2. Both S2 and S4 are from a smaller town in the province of Antalya, and exhibit a higher rate of acoustic insertion than speakers of the ‘standard,’ urban/Istanbul dialect (S3, 5, 6, 7) (Figure
To summarize, there is considerable interspeaker variation even in this small sample, which I suggest reflects variation among different speakers’ grammars of gestural alignment. Some speakers apparently allow complex onsets and often achieve a close /CC/ coordination that does not produce an intrusive vowel. Other speakers also seem to allow complex onsets but employ a different gestural timing with less /CC/ overlap, resulting in a gradient distinction between the lexical and non-lexical vowels. Finally, some speakers do not differentiate lexical and non-lexical vowels; their grammars employ a /CC/ coordination with even less overlap, possibly because they still prohibit complex onsets and require epenthesis.
These three production strategies—categorical differentiation, gradient differentiation, and complete neutralization—correspond to the three strategies employed by different speakers in producing epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic. Some speakers differentiate categorically from lexical vowels, some gradiently, and some not at all (
In contrast, vowel insertion in Turkish is intrusion, produced by a gestural alignment that may be phonologized to different degrees for different speakers. Each speaker of Turkish does not realize consonant clusters in a predictable way. The acoustic variation within speakers could reflect gradience and ambiguity in speakers’ mental representations, as in Gradient Symbolic Computation (
Furthermore, a perceptual study of Turkish onset cluster repair could clarify whether Turkish speakers, particularly monolinguals, are able to distinguish lexical and non-lexical vowels. If Turkish speakers use the acoustic differences to identify intrusive vowels in complex onsets, that would be a point in favor of an analysis where the gestural coordination that produces vowel intrusion is in fact grammaticized in Turkish, and maintained through perceptual cues. A perceptual study would also shed light on the ways in which factors like language-specific phonetic knowledge and the acoustic similarity of the stimuli, which have been shown to affect English speakers’ perception of vowel intrusion (
The additional file for this article can be found as follows:
Models. DOI:
This contrasts with the standard rounding harmony in Turkish, which is triggered by both low and high vowels, but only targets high vowels.
Originally /u/ was included as the third V2 value, rather than /o/, but no sufficiently familiar words of the shape /bru-/ could be found, and so /o/ was selected instead. In some theories, /o/ is considered to be a better trigger of rounding harmony than /u/ (
A note about the /dro-/ cell: In all other C-V conditions, the consonant-cluster of interest is word-initial. But in the dro- condition, the cluster appears word-internally (/bordrom/ ‘payroll.my’). This word was selected in order to maintain the same environment for the cluster as for the underlyingly present vowel, in order to be able to use the real word gardɯrop ‘wardrobe’’ for the /Cɯro/ control word. Ultimately, however, this turned out to be a mistake, because the /rdr/ sequence that was intended as a coda /r/ followed by a complex onset was instead interpreted as a complex coda followed by a simplex onset. Consequently, the /dro/ condition was omitted from the analysis.
If we take a more conservative approach and place the threshold midway between the mean of the lexical vowel duration distribution (57.4 ms) and the mean of a hypothesized no-insertion distribution centered on 0 (i.e., at 28.6 ms), all results are essentially the same.
For S2, unlike S5 and S7, lexical status is not a significant predictor of vowel duration. For S2, lexical vowels had a mean duration of 39.55 ms, and non-lexical vowels had a mean duration of 37.11 ms. The difference was not significant (
For S4, the mean duration of lexical vowels was 48.34 ms, and the mean duration of non-lexical vowels was 47.47 ms. This difference was not significant in a t-test (
I am thankful to many people for their help on this project, especially: Jaye Padgett, Grant McGuire, Amanda Rysling, Ozan Bellik, research assistant Mallika Pajjuri, Douglas Bonett, and Adrian Brasoveanu. I am also grateful to Associate Editor Lisa Davidson and to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly improved this paper. All errors and shortcomings remain my own. Finally, thanks to The Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for supporting portions of this research with a Summer Dissertation Fellowship (2017).
The author has no competing interests to declare.