The goal of this paper is to test whether the palatal nasal stop /n/, occurring in several Romance languages, Hungarian and Czech, is a two-gesture, complex segment (produced with a tongue front closure and intentional tongue dorsum raising) or else a one-gesture, simple segment (articulated at the alveoloprepalatal zone with a single tongue portion including the lamina and predorsum). In order to investigate this issue, electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer data were collected on apical, laminal and dorsal movement data for Catalan /n/ and Russian palatalized alveolar /nj/ (which is known to be a complex segment); other sound classes of both languages were also recorded, namely, the simple palatal segment /j/ and the two-segmental cluster /nj/. Time lags between position maxima at the tongue front and at the tongue dorsum argue strongly in favor of /n/ being a simple segment: they were found to be considerably shorter for /n/ than for /nj/; moreover, those for /nj/ were significantly longer than those for /j/ in Russian but not so in Catalan. In conjunction with linguopalatal contact data from the literature, it is argued that a longer time lag for /n/ vs. /j/ is representative of an unintentional, transitional event resulting from the alveoloprepalatal closure release for the former consonant occurring at the alveolar zone earlier than at the prepalatal zone.

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© 1997 S. Karger AG, Basel
1997
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