Spectral and temporal properties of Estonian palatalization

The aim of this paper is to describe and compare the spectral and temporal properties of Estonian palatalized and non-palatalized consonants /l n s t/ and the vowels that precede them. Acoustic recordings of 43 native Estonian subjects producing word pairs where palatalization differentiated meaning were analyzed in this study. We offer a new perspective on how palatalization is realized by employing a dynamic analysis of the formant trajectories in order to objectively quantify how far the scope of palatalization reaches in the preceding vowel. Results showed that, as in other languages, the most persisting correlate of Estonian palatalization is the rise in F2 in the preceding vowel, where the values are almost always higher already from the beginning. F2 values are higher for /l/ and lower for /n/. The COG (center of gravity) of /s/ is lower in the beginning but rises in the middle. The COG of the burst of /t/ is lower in the onset. As expected, the duration of the vowels preceding consonants is longer, presumably because of the palatalization gesture, but the duration of the consonants does not show a systematic pattern with palatalization.