An instrumental investigation of the phonetic structure of Australian Aboriginal Languages: Consonant sequences in Bininy Gun-Wok

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Our general aim in this proposal, which also forms part of a central goal of phonetics, phonology is to separate those aspects of speech sound production which are particular to a language, or language group, from universals which tend to be found in all languages. The more specific focus is an analysis of the coordination of consonant clusters in the Northern Australian language Bininj Gun-Wok using dynamic electropalatography which measures where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth as a function of time. This analysis from five native speakers of this language will be used to address two principal issues. Firstly, we will investigate whether the instability and variability of syllable-final consonants that has been found in many European languages is also found in Bininj Gun-Wok. Secondly, we analyse whether, as has been found for English and Catalan, a consonant that exerts a strong influence an a neighbouring consonant is also resistant to modifications induced by other consonants. An analysis of Bininj Gun-Wok can shed new light an these issues both because it has such a very rich set of place of articulation contrasts within the oral and nasal stop series and because unlike European languages, Australian languages show synchronic and diachronic lenition and deletion of syllable-initial rather than syllable-final consonants.