Effects of word-level structure on oral stop realization in Hawaiian

Abstract

Hawaiian, or ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, is an Eastern Polynesian language spoken on the islands of Hawaiʻi. This study examines oral stops in Hawaiian as produced by speakers on the 1970–80s radio program Ka Leo Hawaiʻi, first, to establish whether the voiceless stops of this generation of Hawaiian speakers were aspirated or unaspirated, and second, to determine whether word-level prosodic structure has an effect on either the implementation of voice onset time (VOT) or closure duration, or how often stops are lenited. Hawaiian has only two primary oral stops /p k/ ([t] is a rare variant in these speakers’ dialects), and the results indicate that /p/ and /k/ are unaspirated for these speakers. Prosodic influences are examined by coding each stop for lexical word position (initial, medial), prosodic word position (initial, medial) and whether it is in a primary stressed, secondary stressed, or unstressed syllable. Results indicate that prosodic word initial position conditions both longer VOT, closure duration, and fewer lenited productions, separately from lexical word position. Moreover, there is an interaction indicating that word initial position leads to longer VOT in unstressed and secondarily stressed syllables, but not in syllables with primary stress. These results are discussed with respect to the prosodic and phonotactic structure of Hawaiian, which may rely on acoustic cues for the disambiguation of prosodic structure and segmentation of lexical items.