Layman's Summary

English doesn't have any words that end in the mb sound; words like lamb that used to be pronounced this way are now pronounced with just m. However, there are plenty of words that end in mp, such as lamp. This is mysterious, because phonologists have known for a long time that mb is actually easier to pronounce than mp. Why did English keep the more difficult sequence of sounds and lose the easier one?

I believe that these word-final mb sequences turned into m not because they are hard to pronounce, but because they're hard to hear. To test this, I conducted an experiment that tested consonant sequences that are very similar to mb and mp. I found that listeners had a hard time accurately hearing words that ended in the equivalent of mb, but they had no trouble with words that ended with the equivalent of mp. This difference between mb and mp only shows up at the ends of words, which is why it has not been noticed before.

Summary

In work that culminated in a phonology qualifying paper, I have been investigating the behavior of nasal-stop sequences in English, specifically final reduction in words like lamb and medial reduction in words like center. I am particularly interested in the implications for proposed OT constraints such as *NT and *ND, and have concluded from lexical frequency data and from the results of a perception experiment that *ND should be replaced by a constraint relativized to the word-final environment. In related work, I have investigated the articulatory realization of the reduced sequence in center.

Downloadable Stuff

(See CV for citation information. Listed from newest to oldest.)

Qualifying Paper
2008 Markedness and phonetic grounding in nasal-stop clusters
The most thorough write-up of this project to date. Includes descriptions of the two patterns, data from CELEX and from the perception experiment, and a production experiment that investigates the reduced /nt/ sequences in words like center.

ExpOT Handout
2007 *ND#, not *ND: Evidence from English
A description of the two deletion phenomena and the motivation for *ND#. Includes the CELEX lexical frequency data and results of the perception experiment, and briefly discusses the implications for perceptual vs. articulatory grounding of OT constraints.

Phorum Handout
2006 English postnasal stop deletion: *NT vs. *ND
A more developed discussion of the two patterns and the motivation for *ND#. Includes the CELEX data and perception results, and investigates whether it is possible to derive the effects of *ND# from other constraints.

PASC Working Paper
2007 If *NT and *ND got in a fight, who would win? Ranking paradoxes and English postnasal stop deletion
An early discussion of the ranking paradox that results from trying to describe two reduction patterns — the one in lamb and the one in center — in OT simultaneously. Includes the CELEX data.