Effect of Contextual Vowel Height on Nasals in Ambon

Abstract

This study analyses the effect of contextual vowel height on word-initial and word-final nasals in Ambon. Additionally, a few instances of word-final nasal deletion are discussed. Although deletion of oral stops has been mentioned in the existing literature, there is no clear discussion on nasal stops. In this paper, we compare the duration and intensity of the nasals in word-final and word-initial positions and how the contextual vowel height affects these features. Furthermore, we investigate if the instances of nasal deletion are affected by the nasalization of the preceding vowel. The results show that there is an effect of the height of the contextual vowel on the realization of the nasal, in terms of both intensity and duration. We also see that the vowels before the deleted nasals are more nasalized, but we cannot make any inference as we do not have enough tokens of words with nasal deletion for generalizing the findings.