Acoustic characteristics of (alveolo)palatal stop consonants, and velar softening

•Analysis of the affricate identification of the (alveolo)palatal stop in Majorcan Catalan.•Stop affrication occurs mostly before /i/ (less so before /a/) in the word initial intervocalic position.•The affrication process is cued by burst spectral configuration, duration and intensity, and by the vowel transitions.•Speakers differ considerably as to whether they produce and perceive the stop as an affricate.•High affricate identification percentages also take place in intervocalic word final position in the context of /u/.

The paper investigates using data from Majorcan Catalan the acoustic characteristics, and the vowel context and positional conditions, that contribute to the identification of the unaspirated (alveolo)palatal allophone [c] of /k/ as the palatoalveolar affricate /tʃ/ by listeners, and therefore to the implementation of velar softening in the world's languages. Results from perception tests run on [cV] excerpts reveal that affricate percepts are more likely to occur when the (alveolo)palatal stop appears before /i/ than before /a/, which is in agreement with universal patterns of velar softening, and in word-initial and word-final intervocalic position than word-medial intervocalically and utterance initially. Utterance finally [c] is prone to be heard as the fricative [ç]. Affricate identification appears to be associated with context- and position-dependent acoustic cues: high frequency F2 vowel transition endpoints and stop burst spectra, and a long burst, before /i/ and word initially; long range F2 vowel transitions next to /a/, and an intense stop burst in this same vowel context and in intervocalic position. High /tʃ/ identification percentages for [c] in the sequence [uc#u], as well as differences among speakers in producing affricate-like realizations of [c] and among listeners in perceiving the stop as an affricate, are also discussed.