ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on an acoustic study of intervocalic voiceless stops in oral versus nasal contexts in Guaraní. Guaraní is a language well-known for its nasal harmony, in which all voiced segments become nasalized and voiceless segments behave transparent. An acoustic comparison of oral and nasal word pairs in Guaraní provides information about what effect, if any, nasal harmony has on transparent voiceless stops. In addition to supporting the basic transparent character of voiceless stops in Guaraní, the study makes several findings concerning context-dependent differences in voice onset time (VOT), closure voice duration, and closure duration in oral versus nasal environments. Nasal harmony in Guaraní produces cross-segmental spans of nasalization. Nasal spreading in the word is initiated by a nasal vowel in a stressed syllable and is bidirectional. An interesting implication of the contextual variation in timing found in this work is that it confirms the need to characterize the principles involved in the phonetic implementation of phonological features.
