Native Perception of Word-Initial Consonant Gemination in Kelantan Malay

Abstract

The current study investigates the native perception of word-initial consonant gemination by Kelantan Malay speakers. Given the rare behaviour and the potential strengthening of the word-initial length contrast in utterance-initial contexts, this study aims to explore geminate perception of the word-initial consonant contrast from the perspective of native listeners. More specifically, it is of theoretical interest to test the perception of word-initial consonant gemination beginning with voiceless stops in which acoustic information is unavailable in this environment and therefore potentially perceptually indiscernible for listeners. Perception data were collected from thirty native speakers of Kelantan Malay in a forced-choice perceptual experiment involving original stimuli of isolated words in three consonant types (i.e., voiceless stops, voiced stops, and sonorants) and two vowel environments (i.e., /i/ and /a/). Results reveal that native Kelantan Malay speakers are able to identify accurately the original stimuli located in word-initial position across all consonant groups, phoneme types and vowel contexts, though geminates with voiceless stops do not fare as well as those with voiced stops and sonorants. The results provide considerable support for domain-initial strenghthening that suggests the presence of primary and secondary acoustic parameters that may have important perceptual functions for the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast.