Pub Date : 2021-11-03DOI: 10.1017/s0025100321000293
M. Gósy
The beginnings of the field of experimental phonetics can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when (among others) palatography, initiated by an English dentist, started an important new trend in phonetics. This paper outlines the evolution of this revolutionary experimental technique, discusses its two types, direct (static vs. natural) and indirect palatography, and describes the materials and procedures that researchers used. Hungarian scholars, Balassa, Gombocz, Csűry and Hegedűs, were among the very first who used palatography, ahead of many other European researchers. This paper highlights their methodological achievements and some of their findings obtained in studying the articulation of Hungarian vowels and consonants using palatography.
{"title":"On the history of palatography in Hungarian phonetics","authors":"M. Gósy","doi":"10.1017/s0025100321000293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100321000293","url":null,"abstract":"The beginnings of the field of experimental phonetics can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when (among others) palatography, initiated by an English dentist, started an important new trend in phonetics. This paper outlines the evolution of this revolutionary experimental technique, discusses its two types, direct (static vs. natural) and indirect palatography, and describes the materials and procedures that researchers used. Hungarian scholars, Balassa, Gombocz, Csűry and Hegedűs, were among the very first who used palatography, ahead of many other European researchers. This paper highlights their methodological achievements and some of their findings obtained in studying the articulation of Hungarian vowels and consonants using palatography.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44281264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000232
Katrin Wolfswinkler, J. Harrington
The spoken accent of children is strongly influenced by those of their peers but how rapidly do they adapt to sound changes in progress? We addressed this issue in an acoustic analysis of child and adult vowels of West Central Bavarian (WCB) that may be subject to an increasing influence by the Standard German (SG) variety. The study was a combination of longitudinal and apparent-time analyses: re-recordings from 20 WCB children in their first, second and third years of primary school at two schools in rural Bavaria were compared with those of 21 WCB adult speakers from the same area. The question was whether the children’s pronunciation diverged from the adults’ pronunciation and increasingly so in their second and third years. Participants produced stressed vowels in isolated mostly trochaic words in which WCB vs. SG differences were expected. Both adult/child and longitudinal changes in the direction of the standard were found in the children’s tendency towards a merger of two open vowels and a collapse of a long/short consonant contrast, neither of which exists in SG. There was some evidence that, unlike the adults, the children were beginning to develop tensity (= tenseness) and rounding contrasts, which occur in SG but not WCB. There were no observed changes to the pattern of opening and closing diphthongs, which differ markedly between the two varieties. The general conclusion is that WCB change is most likely to occur as a consequence of exaggerating phonetic variation that already happens to be in the direction of the standard.
{"title":"The influence of Standard German on the vowels and diphthongs of West Central Bavarian","authors":"Katrin Wolfswinkler, J. Harrington","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000232","url":null,"abstract":"The spoken accent of children is strongly influenced by those of their peers but how rapidly do they adapt to sound changes in progress? We addressed this issue in an acoustic analysis of child and adult vowels of West Central Bavarian (WCB) that may be subject to an increasing influence by the Standard German (SG) variety. The study was a combination of longitudinal and apparent-time analyses: re-recordings from 20 WCB children in their first, second and third years of primary school at two schools in rural Bavaria were compared with those of 21 WCB adult speakers from the same area. The question was whether the children’s pronunciation diverged from the adults’ pronunciation and increasingly so in their second and third years. Participants produced stressed vowels in isolated mostly trochaic words in which WCB vs. SG differences were expected. Both adult/child and longitudinal changes in the direction of the standard were found in the children’s tendency towards a merger of two open vowels and a collapse of a long/short consonant contrast, neither of which exists in SG. There was some evidence that, unlike the adults, the children were beginning to develop tensity (= tenseness) and rounding contrasts, which occur in SG but not WCB. There were no observed changes to the pattern of opening and closing diphthongs, which differ markedly between the two varieties. The general conclusion is that WCB change is most likely to occur as a consequence of exaggerating phonetic variation that already happens to be in the direction of the standard.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"423 - 455"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43798371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000256
Vladimir Kulikov, F. Mohsenzadeh, Rawand M. Syam
Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic co-articulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /ṭ/ adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.
{"title":"Effect of emphasis spread on VOT in coronal stops in Qatari Arabic","authors":"Vladimir Kulikov, F. Mohsenzadeh, Rawand M. Syam","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000256","url":null,"abstract":"Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic co-articulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /ṭ/ adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"456 - 469"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45833168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-18DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000220
Kayla Palakurthy
This article presents an acoustic phonetic study of contemporary Diné Bizaad (Navajo) sibilant harmony, with a focus on the realization of /s/ and /ʃ/ in two verbal prefixes and one nominal prefix. Data come from wordlists and connected speech recorded in interviews with 50 Diné Bizaad–English bilinguals, aged 18–75 years. The frequency of harmony in each prefix is calculated for speakers of different ages, then acoustic measurements of spectral center of gravity are measured and statistically compared to those in sibilants occurring in harmony-triggering and non-harmony triggering conditions. Results show no significant intergenerational differences in the phonetic or phonological realization of sibilant harmony; speakers consistently and categorically harmonize the two verbal prefixes analyzed here, but rarely harmonize the nominal prefix. This study contributes new phonetic documentation of a typologically rare phonological process and suggests that, in contrast to findings from other studies on endangered languages, sibilant harmony is not undergoing attrition or contact-induced change.
{"title":"The status of sibilant harmony in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)","authors":"Kayla Palakurthy","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000220","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an acoustic phonetic study of contemporary Diné Bizaad (Navajo) sibilant harmony, with a focus on the realization of /s/ and /ʃ/ in two verbal prefixes and one nominal prefix. Data come from wordlists and connected speech recorded in interviews with 50 Diné Bizaad–English bilinguals, aged 18–75 years. The frequency of harmony in each prefix is calculated for speakers of different ages, then acoustic measurements of spectral center of gravity are measured and statistically compared to those in sibilants occurring in harmony-triggering and non-harmony triggering conditions. Results show no significant intergenerational differences in the phonetic or phonological realization of sibilant harmony; speakers consistently and categorically harmonize the two verbal prefixes analyzed here, but rarely harmonize the nominal prefix. This study contributes new phonetic documentation of a typologically rare phonological process and suggests that, in contrast to findings from other studies on endangered languages, sibilant harmony is not undergoing attrition or contact-induced change.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"404 - 422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45619576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-06DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000141
Sabine Zerbian, F. Kügler
The article analyses violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) above the word level in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language, by investigating the realization of adjacent lexical high tones across word boundaries. The results show that across word boundaries downstep (i.e. a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones) only takes place within a phonological phrase. A phonological phrase break blocks downstep, even when the necessary tonal configuration is met. A phrase-based account is adopted in order to account for the occurrence of downstep. Our study confirms a pattern previously reported for the closely related language Southern Sotho and provides controlled, empirical data from Tswana, based on read speech of twelve speakers which has been analysed auditorily by two annotators as well as acoustically.
{"title":"Sequences of high tones across word boundaries in Tswana","authors":"Sabine Zerbian, F. Kügler","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000141","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyses violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) above the word level in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language, by investigating the realization of adjacent lexical high tones across word boundaries. The results show that across word boundaries downstep (i.e. a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones) only takes place within a phonological phrase. A phonological phrase break blocks downstep, even when the necessary tonal configuration is met. A phrase-based account is adopted in order to account for the occurrence of downstep. Our study confirms a pattern previously reported for the closely related language Southern Sotho and provides controlled, empirical data from Tswana, based on read speech of twelve speakers which has been analysed auditorily by two annotators as well as acoustically.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"361 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43817186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-16DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000086
D. Gibbon
The low frequency (LF) spectral analysis or ‘rhythm spectrum’ approach to the quantitative analysis and comparison of speech rhythms is extended beyond syllable or word rhythms to ‘rhetorical rhythms’ in read-aloud narratives, in a selection of exploratory scenarios, with the aim of developing a unified theory of speech rhythms. Current methodologies in the field are first discussed, then the choice of data is motivated and the modulation-theoretic rhythm spectrum and rhythm spectrogram approach is applied to the amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) of speech. New concepts of rhythm formant, rhythm spectrogram and rhythm formant trajectory are introduced in the Rhythm Formant Theory (RFT) framework with its associated methodology Rhythm Formant Analysis (RFA) in order to capture second order regularities in the temporal variation of rhythms. The interaction of AM and FM rhythm factors is explored, contrasting English with Mandarin Chinese. The LF rhythm spectrogram is introduced in order to recover temporal information about long-term rhythms, and to investigate the configurative function of rhythm. The trajectory of highest magnitude frequencies through the component spectra of the LF spectrogram is extracted and applied in classifying readings in different languages and individual speaking styles using distance-based hierarchical clustering, and the existence of long-term second order ‘rhythms of rhythm’ in long narratives is shown. In the conclusion, pointers are given to the extension of this exploratory RFT rhythm approach for future quantitative confirmatory investigations.
{"title":"The rhythms of rhythm","authors":"D. Gibbon","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000086","url":null,"abstract":"The low frequency (LF) spectral analysis or ‘rhythm spectrum’ approach to the quantitative analysis and comparison of speech rhythms is extended beyond syllable or word rhythms to ‘rhetorical rhythms’ in read-aloud narratives, in a selection of exploratory scenarios, with the aim of developing a unified theory of speech rhythms. Current methodologies in the field are first discussed, then the choice of data is motivated and the modulation-theoretic rhythm spectrum and rhythm spectrogram approach is applied to the amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) of speech. New concepts of rhythm formant, rhythm spectrogram and rhythm formant trajectory are introduced in the Rhythm Formant Theory (RFT) framework with its associated methodology Rhythm Formant Analysis (RFA) in order to capture second order regularities in the temporal variation of rhythms. The interaction of AM and FM rhythm factors is explored, contrasting English with Mandarin Chinese. The LF rhythm spectrogram is introduced in order to recover temporal information about long-term rhythms, and to investigate the configurative function of rhythm. The trajectory of highest magnitude frequencies through the component spectra of the LF spectrogram is extracted and applied in classifying readings in different languages and individual speaking styles using distance-based hierarchical clustering, and the existence of long-term second order ‘rhythms of rhythm’ in long narratives is shown. In the conclusion, pointers are given to the extension of this exploratory RFT rhythm approach for future quantitative confirmatory investigations.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"233 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45660131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-10DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000177
Rosey Billington, N. Thieberger, J. Fletcher
Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).
{"title":"Nafsan","authors":"Rosey Billington, N. Thieberger, J. Fletcher","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000177","url":null,"abstract":"Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"511 - 531"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49087766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1017/s0025100321000207
{"title":"IPA volume 51 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0025100321000207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100321000207","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":" ","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0025100321000207","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45809528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1017/s0025100321000190
{"title":"IPA volume 51 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0025100321000190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100321000190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"51 1","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0025100321000190","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43085954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1017/S0025100321000153
S. Mulík, Mark Amengual, G. Avecilla-Ramírez, Haydée Carrasco-Ortíz
The present study provides an acoustic description of the vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho), an endangered and understudied Oto-Manguean language variety spoken in central Mexico. The goal of this production study was to determine whether the phonemic contrasts between Hñäñho vowels, as previously described impressionistically, are maintained in the acoustic realizations of a group of relatively balanced bilingual native speakers of Hñäñho or if Hñäñho phonemic categories are merging due to the extensive influence of Spanish. To this end, each Hñäñho speaker recorded a carefully designed list of 90 Hñäñho words and the resulting dataset of a total of 1507 tokens was subjected to analysis. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to predict Bark scale correlates of vowel height (B1 – b0) and vowel frontness/backness (B2 – B1) and the Pillai scores were calculated in order to determine the degree of overlap for adjacent Hñäñho vowel pairs. The speakers’ Hñäñho vowels were also compared to their Spanish vowels. A list of five Spanish words was used and a total of 90 tokens of the Spanish vowels were recorded. The results confirm that the vowel system of Hñäñho, produced by older Hñäñho speakers, consists of 10 distinct phonemes. Hñäñho-specific phonetic details are discussed, including the fronted realization of the vowel /u/ as [u̟] and the lowering of the vowel /ɔ/ to [ɒ], which might lead to a future /a – ɔ/ merger. These findings underline the importance of early and sustained exposure to indigenous bilinguals’ native language for the maintenance of phonetic features of Hñäñho despite extensive contact with Spanish.
{"title":"The vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho)","authors":"S. Mulík, Mark Amengual, G. Avecilla-Ramírez, Haydée Carrasco-Ortíz","doi":"10.1017/S0025100321000153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000153","url":null,"abstract":"The present study provides an acoustic description of the vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho), an endangered and understudied Oto-Manguean language variety spoken in central Mexico. The goal of this production study was to determine whether the phonemic contrasts between Hñäñho vowels, as previously described impressionistically, are maintained in the acoustic realizations of a group of relatively balanced bilingual native speakers of Hñäñho or if Hñäñho phonemic categories are merging due to the extensive influence of Spanish. To this end, each Hñäñho speaker recorded a carefully designed list of 90 Hñäñho words and the resulting dataset of a total of 1507 tokens was subjected to analysis. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to predict Bark scale correlates of vowel height (B1 – b0) and vowel frontness/backness (B2 – B1) and the Pillai scores were calculated in order to determine the degree of overlap for adjacent Hñäñho vowel pairs. The speakers’ Hñäñho vowels were also compared to their Spanish vowels. A list of five Spanish words was used and a total of 90 tokens of the Spanish vowels were recorded. The results confirm that the vowel system of Hñäñho, produced by older Hñäñho speakers, consists of 10 distinct phonemes. Hñäñho-specific phonetic details are discussed, including the fronted realization of the vowel /u/ as [u̟] and the lowering of the vowel /ɔ/ to [ɒ], which might lead to a future /a – ɔ/ merger. These findings underline the importance of early and sustained exposure to indigenous bilinguals’ native language for the maintenance of phonetic features of Hñäñho despite extensive contact with Spanish.","PeriodicalId":46444,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the International Phonetic Association","volume":"53 1","pages":"383 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0025100321000153","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46115873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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