ABSTRACT
English consonants can occur in groups, known as consonant clusters. For example, there are consonant clusters at the beginning of the words float, cream, sprout and stream, and at the end of the words bank, past, wasps and instincts. Words such as sing, knife, gnome and receipt, of course, don’t contain consonant clusters because clusters are a matter of pronunciation, not spelling. Groups of consonants occurring between words also don’t count as consonant clusters. For example, the /st/ of past is a cluster, while the /st/ of this time isn’t, because the /s/ and the /t/ belong to different words and therefore to different syllables. The consonants of a true cluster must belong to the same syllable. Consonants which are merely adjacent to each other with a syllable boundary between them are known as consonant sequences. This is why /st/ in disturb, where the syllable boundary is before /st/, is a cluster, while /st/ in mistime, where the syllable boundary is between /s/ and /t/, is a sequence.
