Acoustic characteristics of the obstruent and nasal geminates in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan
Résumé
Ikema, an endangered Miyako Ryukyuan dialect spoken in the Miyako islands in
Okinawa, Japan, is characterized by a set of voiced/voiceless geminates in both wordinitial
and medial positions. While the geminates /tt ff ss vv zz tts/ appear in initial and
medial positions (/tta/ ‘tongue’, /ffa/ ‘child’, /ssa/ ‘grass’, /vva/ ‘you’, /zzu/ ‘fish’,
/avva/ ‘oil’), the geminate /dd/ occurs only in medial position (/badda/ ‘side’). As for
nasal geminates, one ‘regular’ type appears in word-initial and medial positions (/nna/
‘spiral shell’, /kannai/ ‘thunder’) while the other occurs only in initial position as a ‘half
voiceless nasal’, that is, the first part of the nasal is a voiceless fricative homorganic to
the second voiced part (/n̥na/ ‘rope’, /m̥mu/ ‘cloud’). The paper provides an acoustic
description of these geminates, complementary to an earlier rt-MRI study on obstruent
geminates by Fujimoto and Shinohara. In the acoustic study, we used oscillograms and
spectrograms to analyze sets of real words uttered several times in isolation by five
native speakers. Our findings confirmed firstly longer closure duration for plosives,
affricates and nasal stops, and longer frication noise for fricatives in geminates
compared to singletons, and secondly, full voicing of voiced geminates. The full voicing
may be a consequence of pharyngeal expansion seen during voiced geminate
constriction in our preceding MRI study. A third finding was the shorter VOT for the
geminate voiceless plosive (/tt/) compared to its singleton counterpart. This
corresponds to the faster transition from the geminate consonants to the following
vowel found in the MRI study. Fourthly, we found that the voiceless friction part of a
‘half voiceless geminate nasal’ is not long enough to fill a half length of a whole geminate
as it lasts only for a short duration. Finally, moraic rather than syllabic timing pattern
was recognized.
Domaines
Linguistique
Origine :
Accord explicite pour ce dépôt
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