Contrastive and non-contrastive pre-stopping in Kaytetye

Kaytetye is one of the few Australian languages for which pre-stopping is contrastive for nasals. This paper provides the first quantitative data on the phonetic realization of contrastive pre-stopping for any Australian language. It also provides data on the hitherto unreported non-contrastive pre-stopping of laterals in Kaytetye. The findings demonstrate that contrastive nasal pre-stopping and non-contrastive lateral pre-stopping differ on three parameters: (a) the conditioning on the distribution of plain vs. pre-stopped realizations; (b) the comparative overall durations of pre-stopped realizations compared to plain realizations; and (c) the duration of pre-stopping.