Tonal Activity in Kara, an Austronesian language spoken in New Britain

This paper presents the results of a small phonetic investigation of tonal activity in Kara, a little-known Austronesian language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Sketchy reports of some kind of tonal contrast in this language surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s, only to disappear in later published references to the language. Our auditory and acoustic investigations confirm the existence of contrastive tone in Kara. Native speaker intuitions also support such a conclusion. At least two tonemes (high and low) are identified. A third tone level (mid) is also noted but appears to be a variant of the low toneme

How pervasive is preaspiration? Investigating sonorant devoicing in Sienese Italian

We have recently found that voiceless geminates in Sienese Italian are frequently preaspirated, eg. /sette/ > [sehte] 'seven'. Within the few (mostly Scandinavian) languages that are reported to have preaspirated voiceless stops, a phonetically similar process of sonorant devoicing before voiceless stops is often reported to occur, eg. Icelandic /vitt/ [viht] ‘breadth’ and /lampi/ [lam8pI] 'lamp' (Hansson, 2001:157). Given that voiceless geminate stops are also frequently preaspirated in Sienese Italian, in this pilot study we investigate whether devoicing of sonorants might also occur, given the cooccurrence of the two phenomena in other preaspirating languages. Our preliminary investigation of /lt/ sequences in spontaneous speech (6 speakers) shows that sonorant devoicing is very frequent, occurring in 85% of all tokens analysed. We provide specific details of its frequency according to speaker, and context, as well as information about its acoustic characteristics

On the Acoustic Characterization of Ejective Stops in Waima’a

We examine some acoustic properties of ejective stops in Waima’a (an Austronesian language spoken in East Timor), and compare them with other voiceless stop types that occur in the language. Previous studies of ejectives in other languages have suggested that they may fall into two classes, strong and weak. We compare our Waima’a results with some existing findings in the literature, and suggest that while Waima’a ejectives might appear to be more appropriately characterized as strong on some criteria, they do not sit squarely in either category

Post-aspiration in standard Italian

Voiceless geminate stops in Italian are typically described as unaspirated in all positions (e.g. [1, 2]). However, recent acoustic phonetic analysis of part of a corpus of standard Italian speech data has shown that the geminate voiceless stops /pp tt kk/ are frequently realized with both preaspiration i.e. [hp: ht: hk:] (cf. [3]) and post-aspiration. This paper focuses on the latter phenomenon, presenting acoustic phonetic evidence in the form of VOT duration values for /pp tt kk/ tokens recorded in 15 Italian cities (based on the CLIPS corpus of spoken Italian [4, 5]). The co-occurrence of post-aspiration with preaspiration is considered and results are discussed with a focus on regional patterns

A preliminary investigation of some acoustic characteristics of ejectives in Waima’a: VOT and closure duration

Waima’a is a little known language spoken in East Timor. From a typological perspective, its stop system is unusual for an Austronesian language: it has a fourway stop system which includes a set of voiceless ejectives. In this paper, we report on the results of our first experimental investigation of Waima’a, in which ejectives and pulmonic voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops are compared. After first presenting some qualitative observations about ejectives, we examine voice onset time (VOT) duration, closure duration and overall duration i.e. closure + VOT. We then turn to a cross-linguistic comparison, looking in particular at the behaviour of ejectives relative to other voiceless stop types, and at possible place of articulation dependencies concerning VOT and closure duration

Comparing voiced and voiceless geminates in Sienese Italian: what role does preaspiration play?

This paper compares the acoustic phonetic appearance of voiced & voiceless geminate stops in Sienese Italian. In our spontaneous speech data voiceless geminate stops are frequently preaspirated, which is an extremely rare phenomenon cross-linguistically. Preaspiration of voiceless stops has been associated in other languages with devoicing of voiced stops. We compare the acoustic appearance & duration of voiceless /VC:/ sequences (with & without preaspiration) with voiced /VC:/ sequences in our language. Results indicate that long voiced stops in Sienese Italian are often partially devoiced – a phenomenon that has not been reported previously for any variety of Italian. We suggest that preaspiration & devoicing are likely related, & attempt to provide an articulatory explanation as to why they occur

Vowel duration, compression and lengthening in stressed syllables in Central and Southern varieties of standard Italian

This study is the first investigation of the effects of regional accent on temporal organization, specifically of vowel duration, in stressed syllables in standard Italian. We examine possible compression effects on the duration of stressed vowels according to word-position (final, penult and antepenult) and syllable type (open vs. closed) in central v. southern varieties of (standard) Italian. Our results show significant regional differences in some contexts, i.e. closed syllables, and antepenultimate position, but not in others. We consider the implications of our results for the phonological description and phonetic investigation of Italian, and the extent to which any such differences may be accounted for

Positional Effects on the Characterization of Ejectives in Waima’a

This paper presents results from an ongoing investigation into stop consonants in Waima’a, focusing on the issue of tense v. lax ejectives. Sources tend to describe ejectives in a given language as either tense or lax; however ejectives in Waima'a, do not fit squarely into either category [4]. Here we compare ejectives in word-initial and word-medial contexts, to specifically address the role of word-position in the tense/lax distinction. Results show that word-position affects the duration of all stop types analyzed, i.e. unaspirated, postaspirated, & ejective stops. Variability amongst the ejective tokens suggests that the notion of a tense/lax dichotomy should be replaced instead with that of a tense/lax continuum

Spirantization of /p t k/ in Sienese Italian and so-called semi-fricatives

This paper presents the results of a first acoustic phonetic investigation into voiceless spirantization in the variety of Tuscan Italian spoken in Siena. Based on spontaneous speech data (6 speakers), we focus upon occurrences of a phonetic variant, previously referred to as a ‘semi-fricative’. Intermediate between a voiceless stop and a voiceless fricative, it is reported to occur in Pisan (e.g. [1], [2]) but not Florentine Italian (e.g. [3])

A Typology of Spreading, Insertion and Deletion or What You Weren’t Told About Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian

This paper focuses on the description and analysis of the external sandhi phenomenon of raddoppiamento sintattico (hereafter RS) in Italian, sometimes referred to as word-initial gemination, for example: (1) No RS due cani [duùe kaùni] ‘two dogs