Ela Thurgood

Coronal contrasts in Anong

This study examines acoustic characteristics of a three-way distinction among a set of voiceless coronal fricatives and two sets of voiceless coronal affricates in Anong, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language. The study shows a lack of parallelism between the fricative and affricate series. The fricatives are well differentiated by spectral shapes and formant transitions of the following vowels, but not by the center of gravity. The affricates are well differentiated by the center of gravity, but not by spectral shapes nor by formant transitions of the following vowels. The study shows that /s/ is acoustically a retroflex, while /ts h ts/ are not.

Affricate gemination in the English of Polish speakers: A study in second language variability

This study investigates the nature of the acoustic variation in sequences of identical affricates produced by Polish learners of English. In both English and Polish sequences of identical affricates occur across word boundaries, but only in Polish do such sequences also occur root internally and across morpheme boundaries. In Polish sequences of identical affricates are manifested variably both by rearticulation of both affricates and by articulation of a single affricate but with lengthened duration of either the stop or the fricative. To investigate their English, the subjects performed two tasks: repetition of 12 English sentences and orally responding to 17 multiple choice questions. The task produced significant cross‐speaker differences in the phonetics of the geminates, differences correlated with differences in their proficiency levels in English. The more Polish‐like singly articulated long affricates were produced by 22% of the intermediate speakers but by 48% of the advanced speakers, the oppos...

Changes in Iu-Mien prevoicing: A focus on speakers in the middle

The focus is on speakers who come from families of 8 to 10 children and are in the middle being the 4th or the 5th child in the family. This paper provides an acoustic analysis of syllable-initial Iu Mien stops produced by these speakers, comparing their stops with those of the older siblings. The distinction is important in that the oldest siblings are Iu-Mien native speakers and English non-native speakers, while the youngest siblings are English native speakers with only some passive knowledge of Iu-Mien. Those in the middle constitute a bridge between the other two groups. They are bilingual in both Iu-Mien and English; as the interviews attest, they regularly use Iu-Mien with their parents and older siblings, and English with their younger siblings. This study discusses in detail the differences in the VOT productions of /b p ph/ and /d t th/. It shows that the presence or lack of prevoicing divides those in the middle into two groups: those who prevoiced all of the 266 voiced VOTs measured, and thos...

A grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham : history, contact, and phonology

From 1963 to 2011 Pacific Linguistics, located at the Australian National University, published over six hundred books concerned with the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia. The Mouton Pacific Linguistics series represents a continuation of this publishing venture under the same Editorial Board. The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and other materials concerned with languages of this region. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world, and its publications are refereed by international scholars with relevant expertise. Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on the languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas, read by scholars with an interest in the region as well as by linguists with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history. Pacific Linguistics is proud to act as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the languages of the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, many of which are little known, and to bring them to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.

Tonal variations in Anong.

This study presents an acoustic analysis of Anong tones. It has three aims: (1) to present some detailed documentation of instrumental‐acoustic data on citation tones, (2) to compare the acoustic features of the citation tones with the same tones used in disyllabic utterances, and (3) to analyze tones in disyllabic utterances. Anong citation tones are characterized by three features. First, the tonal space is small. Second, onset consonant type correlates with the pitch height of the following vowel. Third, non‐modal phonation is not an acoustic cue to any of the five tones. Neither is it a contrastive property of vowels. In disyllabic utterances, the F0 shapes and heights on the first‐syllable tones can be readily related to the F0 shapes and heights in the citation forms. The F0 value of the second‐syllable tones depends on the offset value of the tone in the first syllable. However, disyllabic forms with the prefix /a31/ follow a different pattern, one in which the first‐syllable tone is raised. This p...

Short and long diphthongs in Hainan Cham

This paper focuses on the acoustic features in the contrast between two pairs of phonemically distinctive diphthongs in Hainan Cham, /ai/ versus /a:i/ and /au/ versus /a:u/. The data from six native speakers of Hainan Cham show that the overall duration of long diphthongs does not statistically differ from the overall duration of short diphthongs. The differences, instead, lie in the durational differences between onsets and offsets. In Hainan Cham, the long diphthong onsets are longer than the short diphthong onsets, while their offsets are shorter. The transition duration does not differentiate short and long diphthongs. In Hainan Cham, it occupies only 25–34% of the duration of the whole diphthong, short or long. Another acoustic feature examined in diphthongs is the range and rate of F2 change. In Hainan Cham, /ai/ is well differentiated from /a:i/: The short diphthong /ai/ has a greater F2 range of change and a faster F2 rate of change than the long diphthong /a:i/. However, /au/ and /a:u/ have very similar F2 rate of change.

Perception and production of word‐initial long fricatives in Polish

The paper provides an analysis of the perception and production of the Polish distinction between long fricative /v:/ and short fricative /v/ in pre‐vocalic position. The task involved 27 native speakers of Polish repeating 50 sentences, including the target sentences. The target sentences were minimal pairs with the meaning difference based solely on fricative length. The results showed that the 190‐ms mean duration of the long fricatives was well over twice as long as the 71‐ms duration of the short fricatives. When duration of the fricative fell below 147 ms, the listener’s ability to discriminate between a short and long fricative was significantly reduced. Fricative length correlated with the duration of the following vowel: 78% of the time, the vowel was longer in the syllable with the long fricative. Indeterminacy about the identification of long fricatives is particularly well marked in these data: 42% of the responses to prompts with long fricatives included a distinctive pitch pattern, a so‐call...