Capturing Breathy Voice: Durational Measures of Oral Stops in Marathi

The present study investigates a series of techniques used to capture the durational differences of oral stops in Marathi, an Indic language that exhibits a four-way phonemic distinction among oral stops

Phonation Types in Marathi: An Acoustic Investigation

This dissertation presents a comprehensive instrumental acoustic analysis of phonation type distinctions in Marathi, an Indic language with numerous breathy voiced sonorants and obstruents. Important new facts about breathy voiced sonorants, which are crosslinguistically rare, are established: male and female speakers cue breathy phonation in sonorants differently, there are an abundance of trading relations, and--critically--phonation type distinctions are not cued as well by sonorants as by obstruents. Ten native speakers (five male, five female) were recorded producing Marathi words embedded in a carrier sentence. Tokens included plain and breathy voiced stops, affricates, nasals, laterals, rhotics, and approximants before the vowels [a] and [e]. Measures reported for consonants and subsequent vowels include duration, F0, Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), and corrected H1-H2*, H1-A1*, H1-A2*, and H1-A3* values. As expected, breathy voice is associated with decreased CPP and increased spectral values. A strong gender difference is revealed: low-frequency measures like H1-H2* cue breathy phonation more reliably in male speech, while CPP--which provides information about the aspiration noise included in the signal--is a more reliable cue in female speech. Trading relations are also reported: time and again, where one cue is weak or absent another cue is strong or present, underscoring the importance of including both genders and multiple vowel contexts when testing phonation type differences. Overall, the cues that are present for obstruents are not necessarily mirrored by sonorants. These findings are interpreted with reference to Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995; Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972; Lindblom 1986, 1990). While various incarnations of Dispersion Theory focus on different aspects of perceptual and auditory distinctiveness, a basic claim is that one requirement for phonological contrasts is that they must be perceptually distinct: contrasts that are subject to great confusability are phonologically disfavored. The proposal, then, is that the typology of breathy voiced sonorants is due in part to the fact that they are not well differentiated acoustically. Breathy voiced sonorants are crosslinguistically rare because they do not make for strong phonemic contrasts

The Nature of Optional Sibilant Harmony in Navajo

This thesis represents investigates optional sibilant harmony in Navajo using the first person possessive morpheme, which contains an underlyingly palatal sibilant that may harmonize to alveolar when affixed to noun stems that contain [+anterior] sibilants. The literature commonly describes sibilant harmony as being mandatory in Navajo when sibilants are in adjacent syllables, and optional when there is more distance between sibilants. In other words, sibilant disharmony is ungrammatical, but gradiently rather than categorically; in some instances disharmony is ungrammatical enough that it must be repaired through assimilation, while in other instances it is less ungrammatical and may be tolerated. The statistical nature of the variation in these optional harmony settings is not fully understood, however, and the three studies contained within this thesis were designed to investigate how often assimilation occurs in nonmandatory environments and to identify factors that contribute to the variability observed. In the first study, a Google search was used to evaluate sibilant harmony in online Navajo language use in the Spring of 2008 and again in the Spring of 2010. The findings present a picture of optional sibilant harmony that differs somewhat from the traditional view; harmony seems to be optional even in the environment that has traditionally been described as mandatory, and it occurs far less frequently than anticipated. These results led to the creation of an online survey wherein fluent speakers of Navajo provided grammaticality judgments of both assimilated and unassimilated forms. Almost universally, respondents preferred the unassimilated shi- even in those environments where assimilation would previously have been considered mandatory. The third study involved the recording of data from three speakers of Navajo, none of whom use the assimilated si- either in writing or in speech--at least, not to a degree that is discernible to the naked ear. Acoustic analysis was performed to determine whether the prefix-initial palatal sibilant is acoustically consistent across the board--duration, spectral mean, onset of frication energy, and the second formant of the following vowel were measured to investigate whether the prefixal esh differs acoustically when it appears before words that contain potential triggers than when it does not. Analysis reveals some differences in the spectral mean and duration of the fricative portion of the first person possessive morpheme when it occurs before stems that contain [+anterior] sibilants. Taken together, the findings presented herein suggest that the mandatory sibilant harmony environment no longer exists in Navajo, at least with regards to the first person possessive morpheme. Harmony is far less prevalent than expected overall, and is wholly absent for some speakers. The factors of continuancy and adjacency were found to contribute significantly to the gradience observed in all three studies, however, even for those speakers who do not overtly use assimilation

Acoustic correlates of breathy sonorants in Marathi

Breathy voiced sonorant consonants are typologically rare, more so than other non-modal sonorants (e.g. voiceless sonorants, which are widely attested in language families like Tibeto-Burman and Otomanguean). Similarly, they are more vulnerable to diachronic loss than voiceless sonorants (e.g. in Tibeto-Burman). The acoustic correlates of breathiness in sonorants have not been thoroughly investigated, and a question arises as to whether there is a tie between their acoustics and their typology: does the acoustic encoding of breathiness in sonorants contribute to their typological scarcity? The current study probes this question via instrumental acoustic analysis of breathy and modal obstruents and sonorants in Marathi, an Indic language. Measures standardly used to assess voice quality (F0, H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, H1*-A3*, and Cepstral Peak Prominence) are reported. As expected, breathy voiced obstruents are associated with increased values in the H1-based measures and decreased values in Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), a measure which reflects the presence of noise in the signal. Sonorants show the same general trend, with higher H1-based measures and lower CPP associated with breathy than with plain sonorants, but the differences between plain and breathy consonants is greater in obstruents than in sonorants. Specifically, the acoustic correlates of breathy voice are diminished in post-sonorant contexts. It is proposed that phonemic breathy voice is not acoustically encoded as robustly in sonorant consonants as in obstruents, and that this helps explain the typology

Phonotactic frequencies in Marathi

Breathy sonorants are cross-linguistically rare, occurring in just 1% of the languages indexed in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) and 0.2% of those in the PHOIBLE database (Moran, McCloy and Wright 2014). Prior work has shed some light on their acoustic properties, but little work has investigated the language-internal distribution of these sounds in a language where they do occur, such as Marathi (Indic, spoken mainly in Maharashtra, India). With this in mind, we present an overview of the phonotactic frequencies of consonants, vowels, and CV-bigrams in the Marathi portion of the EMILLE/CIIL corpus. Results of a descriptive analysis show that breathy sonorants are underrepresented, making up fewer than 1% of the consonants in the 2.2 million-word corpus, and that they are disfavored in back vowel contexts

A vowel space comparison of Tlawngrang Zophei and Lawngtlang Zophei

Zophei is an undescribed Tibeto-Burman language within the Kuki-Chin family. Originally spoken in the Chin Hills of Western Myanmar, approximately 4,000 Zophei-speaking refugees now live in Central Indiana. No previous research on Zophei exists. The speakers located in Indiana who identify as ethnically Zophei hail from 14 distinct villages, and it is not yet known how many dialects or languages are represented. As part of a larger effort to kick-start a research program on Zophei, the current study presents vowel spaces for two speakers, one from Tlawngrang and one from Lawngtlang. Differences with regard to the number and distribution of high vowels and diphthongs indicate that these two areas speak different varieties with markedly different phonologies. For example, where one speaker has an /ui/ diphthong the other speaker consistently has the front rounded monophthong /y/. This research contributes to our ultimate goal, which is to determinethe dialectal make-up of Zophei and to develop a description of the language or languages spoken by the ethnic Zophei population in Indiana

Speech Rate Effects on VOT in a 3-category Language: Evidence from Hakha Chin

This study probes the claim made under Laryngeal Realism (e.g., Beckman et al., 2011/2013), by investigating the effect of speech rate on VOT in Hakha Chin. The present study uses the diagnostics of changing the speech rate (Beckman et al., 2011) and examines whether it can be used to find the specified phonological features of a language with a three-way contrast, Hakha Chin. Laryngeal Realism states that the phonological features are privative and that the aspirating language is specified with the feature [spread glottis], while the true voiced language is specified with the feature of [voice]. It has been widely known that the speech rate affects laryngeal stops asymmetrically, and LR authors argue this is because the phonological features are privative rather than binary (e.g. Kessinger & Blumstein, 1997). Methodologically, it attempts to experimentally control the rate variation with the help of a metronome (de Jong, 2001). The present study observes that in Hakha Chin, at a slower rate, the VOT of the prevoiced stop and the aspirated stop increase, while that of the voiceless unaspirated does not, which supports the claims of the LR, but with caveats due to speaker variations

Unlocking the Mystery of Dialect B: A Note on Incipient/aI/-Raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana

This article addresses incipient/aI/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of word list data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., Nike, bison, cyber, tiger). It reports four major/aI/production patterns in the Fort Wayne data, which range on a continuum from no/aI/-raising to phonological raising of/aI/(i.e., raising before t-flaps, a pattern of Canadian raising referred to as Dialect A). In the middle of the continuum is found the elusive Dialect B, a pattern of Canadian raising first documented by Martin Joos in 1942 in which raising occurs in write but not before t-flaps. The authors find that speakers of this type of raising tend not to raise in any trochaic words. In fact, raising in monomorphemic trochaic words, such as Nike or bison, is exceedingly rare in the Fort Wayne data. In tandem with the variation observed within Fort Wayne, the fact that raising has not yet extended into monomorphemic trochaic words further suggests that raising is incipient in this variety. The authors propose that Dialect B is not a separate dialect at all but an incipient variety of Dialect A

Introduction to the inaugural volume of Indiana Working Papers in South Asian Languages and Cultures (IWPSALC)

Welcome to the inaugural volume of IWPSALC. In creating this publication—inspired by progress reports like those published from 1965 through 1995 as the Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research—we seek to encouragescholars to publish discrete portions of their research while they work towards full papers. Too often, our work only sees the light of day when we publish in peer-reviewed journals. We set lofty goals for ourselves,which can end up delaying dissemination of our work. This practice is a positive in that it is good for our science.We want to produce the best work that we can. But there arenegative consequences to the practice as well: how much existing work currently sits somewhere in the cloud,on personal computers, and in field notebooks,unknown and inaccessible to other researchers

Lawngtlang Zophei Swadesh list

This paper presents a preliminary 100-item Swadesh word list for Lawngtlang Zophei. Zopheior Zyphe (ISO 639-3 ZYP) belongs to the Maraic branch of Kuki-Chin within the Tibeto-Burman language family (Eberhard et. al, 2019).Lawngtlang is a Zophei village in the Southeastern corner of the Zophei-speaking area in Thantlang Township, Chin State, Myanmar. Lawngtlang Zophei is considered to be part of the Lower (western) dialects of Zophei. The word list comes from the intuitions of our co-author Zai Sung,a 22-year-old native speaker born in Lawngtlang and currently living in Indianapolis, Indiana. She also speaks Hakha Chin and English, as well as having some familiarity with Burmese (the language of education in Myanmar)