While phoneticians are on Twitter b/c of the ASA, we have a . I'm sure many of you have observed a silent interval on a spectrogram btwn a fric & nasal in many languages. What causes this silence? If you're segmenting sounds, does the silent interval go w/the fric or the nasal?

Note that this isn't the same environment as an intrusive stop (e.g. "Chom(p)sky") since this is fric-nasal, not nasal-fric. An articulatory reason for the former seems clearer to me than this case. But mostly I'm interested in how people segment these.

Here's another clue we just thought to look at: top is ambient noise during a pause (~20ms), bottom is the interval btwn /s/ & /n/. The frequencies are similar (we overlapped them too), but the bottom seems noisier. What if there's nasal airflow & the mic is picking it up?