The perception of rearticulated and single-articulated geminates in Polish

Abstract

Geminates are a group of consonants that are articulated for a longer period of time than their corresponding singleton consonants. In all known geminating languages other than Polish, longer constrictions of geminates are undisrupted, and they are therefore referred to as long counterparts of singletons (Davis 2011). Constriction lengthening appears to be the default and dominant type of geminate articulation; no other articulation type is mentioned in the two cumulative publications on geminates in the world’s languages (Kawahara 2015, Kubozono 2017), or in numerous journal publications on durational and spectral properties of geminates (references in Hamzah et al. 2016, Rojczyk and Porzuczek 2019a). Polish is an exception here, because it has both true (lexical) and fake (concatenated by morphological process) geminates that may be either single-articulated by lengthening the constriction phase, or rearticulated. Rearticulation is manifested by the production of each consonant separately with central disruption of the whole geminate. The result is the perceptible release of the first consonant, especially observable in the case of stops and affricates. Figures 1 and 2 show the single-articulated (left) and rearticulated (right) productions of the word getto ‘ghetto’ and lekko ‘lightly’ in Polish. Although rearticulation of Polish geminates appears to be a unique feature of geminate production, it has drawn relatively little attention to date. Thurgood (2001) recorded the production of geminate affricates by 27 speakers of Polish and found that 61% of the collected tokens were rearticulated. Thurgood and Demenko (2003) reported a similar ratio (68%) of rearticulated geminate affricates produced by nine speakers. They also observed a large between-speaker variation in the articulation type in that some speakers rearticulated most of the time, while others tended to single-articulate. Rojczyk and Porzuczek (2014) analysed the production of nasal geminates by 26 speakers and found that only 3.8% of them were rearticulated,