Duration of epenthetic [t] in polysyllabic American English words

Abstract

This paper reports how stress and the position of the /ns/ cluster in polysyllabic words affect [t] epenthesis in four different environments: (1) word-medial after a stressed vowel (e.g. ' ce n.s us vs. ' de nts us ); (2) word-final after a stressed vowel (e.g. in .' te ns e vs. in ' te nts ); (3) word-medial after a stressless vowel (e.g. co n .' s ent vs. blu nt ' s ay.ing ); and (4) word-final after a stressless vowel (e.g. ' sci.e nc e vs. ' con.te nts ). Analysis of stop closure durations in experimental sentences read by seven American English speakers reveals that position, not stress, is the most important factor in [t] epenthesis: final position (e.g. science and intense ) favors epenthesis. Stress is found to have an effect on stop closure durations in the way it interacted with word-position – i.e. for the final /ns/ cluster, stress immediately before it disfavors epenthesis (e.g. intense ). The underlying /t/ is shown to be not significantly longer than the epenthetic [t]. Measurements from polysyllabic words in the TIMIT corpus corroborate the experimental results that word-final position favors epenthesis and that stress does not correlate with epenthesis. In the TIMIT data, however, underlying /t/ was significantly longer than epenthetic [t].