Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Testing Licensing By Cue: A Case Of Russian Palatalized Coronals, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

The hypothesis ‘licensing by cue’ by Steriade holds that phonological contrasts are maintained in environments that provide better acoustic cues to the contrasts and are neutralized in environments that provide poorer acoustic cues or no cues. This paper tests the hypothesis by examining the distribution of a phonological contrast – the Russian plain/palatalized coronal stops /t/ and /tj/ in various syllable- final contexts. The results of a series of acoustic and perceptual experiments presented in this paper provide some support for the hypothesis: the relative salience of releases in different word boundary contexts (_#k > _#n, _#s) correlates strongly with the …