Exploring Onset Cluster Preferability

This paper critically examines two metrics for measuring phonetic similarity: Net Auditory Distance (NAD) (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2014) and the Phonetic Similarity Metric (PSM) (Mielke 2012). Taking insights from these, a new metric for measuring articulatory ease is proposed: the Articulatory Gradience Scale (AGS). The AGS provides a metric to consistently measure the articulatory ease of consonant clusters. Taking into account a description of vocal tract anatomy, changes in airflow/voicing, etc., and real-time sound production overlap, numerical values representing the articulatory ease of consonant clusters are calculated. The results and predictions of the NAD, PSM, and AGS are compared; a need is demonstrated to consider not only the presence of phonetic difference, but the type and degree of that difference when determining underlying motivations for phonotactics in a given language. It is further shown that the resulting AGS values for American English onset clusters show a degree of overlap with predictions made by the Sonority Sequencing Principle.