Geminate and singleton contrast in English affixed words

Hye Jeong Yu
2022 Phonetics and Speech Sciences  
This paper presents two experiments examining different gemination behavior of English affixes. Experiment 1 focused on geminates through affixation with im-, un-, -ness, and -ly. The English group articulated geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for im-, un-, and -ness, but there was no difference for -ly. This suggests that -ly words are more likely to be perceived as whole words, and that -ly is less decomposable. Furthermore, un-geminates exhibited longer
more » ... olute and preceding vowel durations than im-geminates, suggesting that im-is more decomposable than un-. However, the Korean group produced geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for all im-, un-, -ness, and -ly, and produced comparable absolute durations of im-and un-geminates. Experiment 2 investigated different gemination behaviors of locative and negative im-prefixes. The English group showed durational contrast between geminates and singletons only for negative im-, indicating that locative im-is not easily separated from stem. However, the Korean group produced longer absolute and relative durations for geminates than for singletons for both locative and negative im-. According to the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, affix decomposability is less likely to influence Korean speakers' English affix gemination, and spellings may have a greater influence.
doi:10.13064/ksss.2022.14.3.067 fatcat:iddauyd5mngmhjn2hzwtnpw4xy