A Phonetically-Based Optimality Theoretic Account of Consonant ...

allophone should be, in view of the phoneme's articulatory variability. I also refrain from
choosing a basic allophone for the word-initial voiced stops.
Interpreting this articulatory variation particular to the non-word-initial position as
imprecision of the articulation, we find Kohler's statement appropriate in accounting for
this asymmetry in the degree of articulatory invariance of Taiwanese word-initial and word­
final consonants: Kohler (1991) states that the "word-initial position has a higher
signalling value for a listener and must therefore be given a more precise articulation by a
speaker .... What is not very distinctive for a listener anyway may be reduced by a speaker
more easily to yield to the principle of economy of effort" (Jun 1995: 37, citing Kohler
1991: 189). In addition, it has often been suggested (for example, in Brown and McNeill
1966) that the word-initial position plays an important role in lexical access in speech
production. Thus, in Taiwanese, only the perceptually less salient non-initial positions
allow ease-of-articulation considerations to override the ease-of-perception principle,
yielding variable articulations across prosodic environments. The smaller, ease-of­
articulation-governed non-initial inventory and the larger, contrast-preservation-govemed
word-initial inventory of Taiwanese can thus be said to conform to Lindblom and
Maddieson's generalization in (1): In non-word-initial positions, where preservation of
contrasts is a relatively low priority, articulatory effort is minimized; in the word-initial
position, where preservation of contrasts is a relatively high priority, more articulatory
effort is invested to maximize the ease of perception.
Based on the assumption that speech production represents language-specific
compromises between ease of articulation and ease of perception, this paper will provide an
account of final consonant lenition in Taiwanese, focusing on supraglottal gestural
reduction in IP, T, KI. The claim put forth in the present paper is that word-final reduction
is a general process in Taiwanese, with the aim of effort minimization. I will argue that the
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