Timing Differences in St’át’imcets Glottalised Resonants: Linguistic or Bio-mechanical?

In this paper we explore articulatory timing in the glottalised resonant series of St’át’imcets, an Interior Salish language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. We show that while these sounds form a natural class phonologically (van Eijk, 1997), they behave as two distinct classes phonetically: [-sonorant] segments /Œ ¶/ are systematically pre-glottalised. In contrast, [+sonorant] segments / „ TM ’ j’ a 1/ are post-glottalised word-finally, and intervocalically glottalisation overlaps with the oral articulation. We propose that articulatory timing in complex segments in subject not only to positional effects (Gick, 2003; Krakow, 1993; Silverman, 1995; Steriade, 1997), but also consonantal effects. We further propose that these effects are due to articulatory and biomechanical restrictions on speech, and need not be linguistically encoded.