Temporal organization in sibilant-stop clusters in Moenat Ladin

In this paper, we probe the temporal organization of word-initial consonant clusters in Moenat Ladin, a threatened and understudied minority Romance language in Italy. We focus on sibilant-stop clusters and hypothesize that the sibilant is external to a syllable onset. Our hypothesis is probed with an experiment that investigates the temporal coordination of gestures, which bears on the organization of elements in syllable structure. By employing the methodology of Ruthan et al. (2019) and Durvasula et al. (2021), we conduct acoustic analyses of sibilant-stop, sibilant-stop-rhotic, and stop-lateral clusters. The findings of this study suggest that word-initial sibilants before a stop in Moenat are organized external to the syllable onset, which is similar to the syllable structure of Italian. This research also highlights the utility of the acoustic methodology for probing the temporal organization of consonant clusters.