Phonological representations of consonant sequences: the case of affricates vs. ‘true’ clusters

In this paper we investigate the behavior of Greek affricates as opposed to all other Greek
cluster types. The phonotactics of the language as well as the data of an off-line experimental task support a preference for the preservation of affricates over stop+/s/ over /s/+stop clusters and all other clusters. A strong tendency of the participants in the experiment was to break up clusters by inserting a vowel while they retained almost all affricates intact. This linguistic behavior is attributed, first, to the identity of place of articulation of the consonants being members of the clusters and, second, to the (degree of) satisfaction of the scale of consonantal strength. Affricates tend to exhibit a limited degree of decomposition; stop+/s/ clusters exhibit a relative degree of decomposition, /s/+stop clusters undergo and even higher degree of decomposition while other cluster types are decomposed massively. Our assumption is that different degrees of decomposition are the result of (a) different phonological representations, (b) the co-occurrence of clusters with other clusters in the word and (c) their position in the
word.