|| (< ) |} In stems that end in a vowel cluster, only the second vowel of the cluster is reduplicated: {| | || ('corn (duoplural)') || (< ) |} And a nasal cluster has a reduplicated and denasalized second vowel: {| | || ('bed') || (< ) |} Vowel deletion Taos shares with other languages in the region (Pueblo linguistic area) an areal feature of vowel elision at the end of words. When a word ends in a final vowel, the vowel may be deleted resulting in a consonant final word. This is especially common with final and occasionally with final . The elision is also very common when the final is preceded by a sonorant consonant such as , etc. For example, the 3rd person pronoun particle ('he, she, it, they') is often phonetically with syllable reduction and a resulting closed syllable. Other examples include {| | || ('hundred') || > || |- | || ('thousand') || > || |- | || ('and') || > || |- | || ('why, because') || > || |} In the words , the voiced stops become phonetically voiceless, unreleased, and have long durations when word-final in addition to the loss of the final vowel. Vowel elision is common in connected speech. notes that the elision may affect stress patterns but that this requires further research. states that the deletion of final after a sonorant and the retention of is in free variation but may be related to speaking speed and syntax although the details are still unknown. Prosody Stress Trager analyzes Taos as having three degrees of stress: primary secondary unstressed Trager describes Taos stress in terms of loudness; however, he also notes in several places where stress has effects on vowel length and vowel quality. All words must have a single primary stress. Polysyllabic words can, in addition to the syllable with primary stress, have syllables with secondary stress, unstressed syllables, or a combination of both unstressed and secondarily-stressed syllables. states that the primary and secondary stress levels are in complementary distribution in low-toned and high-toned syllables. However, his later analysis rejects this. When two morphemes both with a primary stress in each morpheme are concatenated together, the first primary stress in the leftmost morpheme becomes a secondary stress (while the rightmost morpheme retains the primary stress). Tone Taos has three tones: high (symbol: acute accent ´) mid (symbol: macron