Duration of the coda clusters in English

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to see if there is any durational difference between the consonant clusters articulated by the same articulators (homorganic consonant clusters) and those articulated by two different articulators (non-homorganic articulators) with a focus on consonant clusters which occur in the coda position in English. To the end, I ran a small experiment where duration of C1 in (C)VC1, C2 in (C)VC2, and C1C2 in (C)VC1C2 are measured and compared with each other. The result suggests that in the coda it does not play any role in duration of the consonant clusters whether the articulators involved in the consonant clusters are same or different. What we have found is that duration of consonant clusters is close to the sum duration of two consonants regardless of whether it involves a same articulator or two different articulators.