Prosodic and segmental effects on EPG contact patterns of word-initial German clusters

This study investigates the effects of segmental composition and prosodic variation, namely boundary strength and lexical stress, on the production of word-initial clusters in German. The internal structure of the clusters /kl, kn, ks, sk/ has been analyzed by means of EPG recordings from seven speakers of German. Derived temporal and spatial parameters indicate that /kn/ is consistently produced with a lag between the consonants and /kl/ with considerable overlap. This categorical difference is also stable across stress and boundary conditions and is attributed to manner-based and perceptual recoverability constraints. No clear pattern emerges for /sk/ and /ks/. Therefore, stability of temporal organization across prosodic conditions is only tested for /kl/ and /kn/. Temporally, boundary level affects the duration of the adjacent consonant and the overlap within the clusters /kn/ and /kl/, whereas spatially /k/ is affected only in /kn/ but not in /kl/. Stress effects are not restricted to the nucleus but also affect the internal organization of the clusters. The interplay between segmental and prosodic timing effects indicates that the internal structure of clusters shows linguistically crucial and highly constrained timing patterns which can only vary within certain limits.