Prosodic boundaries influence patterns of consonantal strengthening and weakening across languages (Fougeron and Keating, 1997; Kakadelis, 2018; Katz and Fricke, 2018; Keating et al., 2003; White et al., 2020). Onset obstruents/nasals in prosodically prominent positions are lengthened and produced with greater contact between active and passive articulators (Fougeron and Keating, 1997; Fletcher, 2010; Keating et al., 2003; Lavoie, 2001). Typically, articulatory strengthening occurs in utterance-initial and word-initial position while weakening/reduction occurs in word-medial position (Katz and Fricke, 2018). We provide phonetic evidence that certain obstruents in word-medial, pre-tonic position are both lengthened and strengthened in Itunyoso Triqui, an indigenous language of Mexico, while word-initial obstruents are often shorter and reduced. We examined 67 min (8933 segments) from a spontaneous speech corpus produced by nine native speakers; and measured duration, voicing lenition, and spirantization. Onset consonants were lengthened slightly in stem-final (stressed) syllables but shortened elsewhere. For sonorant consonants, no utterance-initial lengthening was observed. These findings agree with previous work on a related Mixtecan language—Yoloxóchitl Mixtec (DiCanio et al., submitted)—and pose unique challenges for views hypothesizing that consonantal strengthening is either (a) universal or (b) serves to enhance word-level parsing (Katz and Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.