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One could infer from this that in languages without compensatory lengthening, or
other processes which involve the presence of a second mora in a syllable, NC sequences
should not be lengthened with respect to singleton Ns and Cs. There is some evidence to
suggest that this is the case. For example, Maddieson (1989) finds that prenasalized stops
in Fijian have the same closure duration characteristics as plain stops and liquids. 3
With these observations in mind, I examined the closure duration of prenasalized
stops in Mono to determine if there is a noticeable increase in duration in comparison to
plain stops. Mono is actually a better test case than Fijian for such a study. In Mono, like
in Fijian, prenasalized stops unambiguously pattern as single segments. 4 But Mono has a
three-way contrast between voiceless, voiced, and prenasalized stops, whereas Fijian only
has a contrast between plain voiceless stops and prenasalized stops. In Fijian,
prenasalized stops could be interpreted phonologically as plain voiced stops, but in Mono
such an interpretation is impossible.
I identified the start and end of closure via the following criteria. For plain stops,
the beginning of closure was marked where vertical striations disappeared from across
frequency range and only low-frequency striations remained visible. For prenasalized
stops, the beginning of closure was marked where there was a significant drop in the
strength of the formants and there was a clear change from the oral resonance values to
the nasal resonance values. The end of closure was identified by the spike representing
the stop burst. In all cases, the closure start- and end-points were readily identifiable. For
example, the beginning and end of closure is indicated by the arrows in Figures 8.11 and
8.28.
3 Maddieson measured closure duration in his study. On the other hand, Hubbard measured
individual segments following Peterson & Lehiste’s (1960) criteria for demarcation.
4 Also, there are no nasal + stop sequences across morpheme or word boundaries.
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