Voice onset time in Angami

Abstract

Angami has three-way laryngeal contrasts in stops, i.e., voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated. Apart from that, Angami also has four phonetically level tones. Due to the level nature of the lexical tones in Angami, consonantal perturbations could be investigated clearly. The results of the study showed that the extent of consonantal perturbation depended on the tonal categories. Voiceless consonantal perturbations were weaker as tone categories got higher. Conversely, voiced stop consonantal perturbations were weaker as tone categories got lower. This study also found a systematic relationship between tone height and VOT duration. High tones induced shorter VOT, while low tones induced longer VOT.