Sandhi in Plains Cree

Recent phonetic studies of external sandhi across languages have found some cases to be categorical and others to be gradient, as well as considerable inter-speaker variation. This study examines sandhi in Plains Cree, using acoustic analysis of natural speech from the narratives of two speakers. One type of sandhi, involving the apparent deletion of the first vowel and compensatory lengthening of the second (e.g., /a#o/ →→ [oː]), is shown to be gradient and probably resulting from gestural overlap. Another more specialized type, the (possibly morphosyntactically governed) coalescence of /a+i/ or /aː+i/ to [eː], appears to be categorical. Implications for practical orthography are discussed.