The duration of word-final /s/ differs across morphological categories in English: evidence from pseudowords

Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic > plural > clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is- and has-clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production.