Alignment of phonetic and phonotactic evidence for the Dual Nasal Hypothesis

Abstract

This investigation demonstrates for the first time, phonetic evidence for a sonority-based split in the nasal natural class through case studies of Manam, Swahili, and Spanish.  Previous studies on sonority have shown that phonotactic patterns as well as relative (minimum) intensity measurements indicate that nasals have lower sonority than liquids cross-linguistically. However, Kramer & Zec (2020) proposed the “Dual Nasal Hypothesis” citing new phonotactic evidence that many languages' nasalconsonants are actually more sonorant than their liquids.  The current investigation used relative intensity to investigate this claim phonetically. Acoustic analyses revealed that relative intensity of nasals in Manam and Swahili, were indeed significantly greater than those of the [l]s.  This relationship is the opposite from what was found in the control low-sonority nasal language, Spanish.  These findings coincide with the phonotactic patterns of all three languages thus supporting the Dual Nasal Hypothesis.