Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

as laughter during production and external noise. Subject MG was particularly
prone to producing fricated stop variants, and almost half of his
(intervocalic) word-initial stops were produced in this manner. The remaining
two subjects produced fricated variants relatively rarely. Since a
definite point for the onset of oral closure and opening cannot be established
for fricated variants, they cannot be included in measurements of
aspiration durations. For ES’s read speech data, none of the 56 wordinitial
stop tokens were excluded from analysis.
Table 4–17. Overview of the word-initial fortis stop data analysed for the four
Western Åland subjects.
Unscripted Read
MG AJ NK Total ES
Stop closure 27 64 76 167 56
Fricative 22 7 2 31 0
Laughter etc. 3 11 10 24 0
Total 52 82 88 222 56
A similar overview of the word-medial stop data is given in Table 4–
18. In total, 467 tokens of word-medial fortis stops occurred in the unscripted
data. Of these, 73 were excluded from analysis. In 23 cases, a
complete stop closure was not made and a fricative stop variant was produced.
Again, subject MG produced the largest number of fricated stops.
A further 32 cases were excluded from analysis because either stop or
preceding or following vowel were produced such that measurements
were impossible. A total of 18 cases were discarded because of laughter,
external noise, etc. None of ES’s 59 stop tokens was discarded.
Finally, Table 4–19 gives an overview of the data analysed for sequences
of nasal + stop + vowel. A total of 196 occurrences of such sequences
were obtained from the unscripted data. Fricative variants are
less common in these data than in the intervocalic data. For example,
MG produced a fricated stop variant in only 5 of his 62 tokens. However,
it is apparent that in 66 of a total of 196 cases were produced in such a
way as to make reliable durational measurements impossible. This is due
almost entirely to the tendency of the subjects to produce the negation
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