ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF POLISH HOMORGANIC STOP CLUSTER ACROSS WORD-BOUNDARY

The paper endeavours to verify an observation that Polish homorganic stop geminates straddling word boundaries are unreleased. Fifteen Polish subjects participated in the experiment, producing stop geminates in different contexts specified for the place of articulation, articulatory tempo, and voiced-voiceless distinction. The collected samples were acoustically analysed for presence or absence of the release burst. The results do no corroborate a putative unreleased status of Polish homorganic stop geminates across word boundaries. They show, however, that the frequency of released geminates strongly depends on the place of articulation, with dental /t, d/ released most frequently. Voiceless stops tend to be more readily released than voiced stops, albeit this tendency is only close to significant. Moreover, a significant impact of the tempo of articulation on the occurrence of the release burst has been demonstrated for both voiced and voiceless stops - longer utterance are conducive to unreleased realisations of geminates.