A new look at Pattani Malay initial geminates: A statistical and machine learning approach

In this paper, we present a statistical and machine learning approach to the acoustic discrimination of a cross-linguistically unusual phonological contrast, initial geminates vs. singletons in Pattani Malay. We show that the only statistically significant difference between geminates and singletons is the duration of the consonant itself. No differences in F0 and intensity were observed on the following vowel, contra earlier reports. We further investigated the robustness of this contrast using linear discriminant analysis. Results show that discrimination is above chance, but poor (~62%). The large overlap between the two categories may be partly due to the naturalistic nature of our speech samples. However, we also found that the contrast is neutralized in some minimal pairs. This merger is surprising since initial geminates are often the sole realization of lexical and morphosyntactic contrasts. We suggest that the singleton/initial geminate contrast is now best characterized as a marginal contrast. We hypothesize that this marginally contrastive status may be the result of an on-going sound change, perhaps connected with the more modest role that initial geminates play in Pattani Malay morphophonological alternations.