People can discern wether a plosive is /p t k/ by formant transition of a vowel. While how do people discern them, if it is a consonant cluster of few plosives without any voicing, as [pt] or even some voiceless random sequences such as [ptkpktpkpt]?
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2 Answers
Richard Wright discusses this w.r.t. Tsou, which has a number of initial stop clusters, e.g. pka:ko "to escape", tpihi "mend cloth" (and other kinds of clusters, but stop clusters are the most challenging). There are a number of strategies for making consonants without vowel transitions perceptible, and in the case of stop clusters, there is a high-amplitude release burst between the consonants, which carries sufficient information to allow identifying the pre-consonantal consonant.
The burst intensity and duration can be features that can be discriminating. There is also the number of bursts that can be taken into account. [k] has generally multiple bursts.
answered Oct 30, 2018 at 21:16
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Does duration really figure? Isn't it the initial noise spectrum that is most discriminating of plosives?– amICommented Oct 31, 2018 at 4:52
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No -- I was asking if the duration is different for different plosives, making it a discriminatory feature, or are spectral differences during the initial burst the only real discriminant (with the durative noise having little or no discerning effect).– amICommented Nov 1, 2018 at 0:52
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1There are some studies showing that the burst duration increases from [p] to [t] to [k]. There is also a relation between the intensity and the duration, the stronger is the intensity, the longer is the duration. The stress, the phonetic context and the position can play a role in the burst duration. Well, it is true sometimes the burst is not visible, so the duration cannot be measured, but it is the same thing for the frequencies. Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 16:21