Coarticulation in nasal and lateral clusters in Warlpiri

Indigenous Australian languages are said to show remarkable stability in C1C2 sequences with no evidence of assimilation of place of articulation. An EPG corpus of Warlpiri was examined to test the extent of spatio-temporal modification in a series of nasal and lateral/oral stop clusters that differed in place of articulation. There was evidence of limited anticipatory coarticulation in nasal clusters. Laminal palatal sonorants also exerted the strongest carryover coarticulatory effects on the following consonant although place contrasts were maintained showing that the extent of coarticulation (both spatially and temporally) is somewhat constrained by the phonological structures of the language.