Heriberto Avelino

Linguistic and maternal genetic diversity are not correlated in native mexicans

Mesoamerica, defined as the broad linguistic and cultural area from middle southern Mexico to Costa Rica, might have played a pivotal role during the colonization of the American continent. The Mesoamerican isthmus has constituted an important geographic barrier that has severely restricted gene flow between North and South America in pre-historical times. Although the Native American component has been already described in admixed Mexican populations, few studies have been carried out in native Mexican populations. In this study, we present mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence data for the first hypervariable region (HVR-I) in 477 unrelated individuals belonging to 11 different native populations from Mexico. Almost all of the Native Mexican mtDNAs could be classified into the four pan-Amerindian haplogroups (A2, B2, C1, and D1); only two of them could be allocated to the rare Native American lineage D4h3. Their haplogroup phylogenies are clearly star-like, as expected from relatively young populations that have experienced diverse episodes of genetic drift (e.g., extensive isolation, genetic drift, and founder effects) and posterior population expansions. In agreement with this observation, Native Mexican populations show a high degree of heterogeneity in their patterns of haplogroup frequencies. Haplogroup X2a was absent in our samples, supporting previous observations where this clade was only detected in the American northernmost areas. The search for identical sequences in the American continent shows that, although Native Mexican populations seem to show a closer relationship to North American populations, they cannot be related to a single geographical region within the continent. Finally, we did not find significant population structure in the maternal lineages when considering the four main and distinct linguistic groups represented in our Mexican samples (Oto-Manguean, Uto-Aztecan, Tarascan, and Mayan), suggesting that genetic divergence predates linguistic diversification in Mexico.

Y‐chromosome diversity in Native Mexicans reveals continental transition of genetic structure in the Americas

The genetic characterization of Native Mexicans is important to understand multiethnic based features influencing the medical genetics of present Mexican populations, as well as to the reconstruct the peopling of the Americas. We describe the Y-chromosome genetic diversity of 197 Native Mexicans from 11 populations and 1,044 individuals from 44 Native American populations after combining with publicly available data. We found extensive heterogeneity among Native Mexican populations and ample segregation of Q-M242* (46%) and Q-M3 (54%) haplogroups within Mexico. The northernmost sampled populations falling outside Mesoamerica (Pima and Tarahumara) showed a clear differentiation with respect to the other populations, which is in agreement with previous results from mtDNA lineages. However, our results point toward a complex genetic makeup of Native Mexicans whose maternal and paternal lineages reveal different narratives of their population history, with sex-biased continental contributions and different admixture proportions. At a continental scale, we found that Arctic populations and the northernmost groups from North America cluster together, but we did not find a clear differentiation within Mesoamerica and the rest of the continent, which coupled with the fact that the majority of individuals from Central and South American samples are restricted to the Q-M3 branch, supports the notion that most Native Americans from Mesoamerica southwards are descendants from a single wave of migration. This observation is compatible with the idea that present day Mexico might have constituted an area of transition in the diversification of paternal lineages during the colonization of the Americas.

Acoustic and Electroglottographic Analyses of Nonpathological, Nonmodal Phonation

Languages where phonation type and tone are contrastive make use of extremely fine and controlled actions of laryngeal structures; hence, there is little opportunity to variation in either phonation or pitch. Nonetheless, many American Indian languages have contrastive nonmodal phonation, which, moreover, is subject to a great deal of variation. There are a few studies addressing the phonetics of nonmodal phonation in American Indian languages, and little is known about the phonetics/phonology interface of laryngeal features within the sound patterns of these languages. This article aims to contribute to the knowledge of nonmodal phonation through the detailed study of the phenomenon in Yalálag Zapotec (YZ) and American Indian language. A series of spectral and electrophysiological analyses contribute to the description of YZ nonmodal phonation and its variability across gender. It is argued that the temporal patterns in realization of laryngealization are a property of YZ speakers grammar.

An articulatory and acoustic study of Pima coronals

The obstruents of Pima, a Uto‐Aztecan language spoken in Arizona, have been impressionistically described as involving a contrast between dental and retroflex sounds (Saxton, Saxton, and Enos, 1983; Saxton, 1963). The current study aimed to refine the description of these sounds by investigating palatographic and linguographic data with a concurrent acoustic analysis of recordings from 6 Pima speakers. The results from articulatory data demonstrated that the traditionally so‐called retroflex sounds are produced with the apex of the tongue in the alveolar region while the dentals are produced with the blade of the tongue. This evidence suggests that Pima retroflex sounds are not similar to the corresponding sounds in languages such as Hindi or Toda, which are articulated as apical post‐alveolars or sub‐apical palatal, respectively (Ladefoged and Bhaskararao, 1983; Shalev, Ladefoged, and Bhaskararao, 1994; Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996). Rather, the Pima retroflexes are more similar to the corresponding sou...

Mexico City Spanish

Spanish is a Romance language spoken by approximately 405,638,110 speakers in the world (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2013 ). Two major varieties are distinguished, Peninsular Spanish (Spain) and the Spanish spoken in the Americas, although it is also spoken natively in some parts of Africa, and in the United States. Spanish in the Americas comprises several dialects well differentiated by variations in the lexicon, phonology and, more importantly, in intonational patterns. In Mexico 86,211,000 (88% of the population) use Spanish as their first language, and a significant number of indigenous people have Spanish as their second language. The variety illustrated here is representative of the speech of the educated middle-class population from the metropolitan zone (three female and three male speakers in their 30s), which has as its center Mexico City, the most densely populated urban area in the country with more than 20 million people according to the Mexican National Census (INEGI 2010 ).

Perceptual constancy and contextual enhancement

The perception of the acoustic world surrounding us very often is different from its physical properties. Our mental representation of the sounds that we are exposed to are not in a one to one correspondence with the sounds we sense. Auditory objects and their environments are categorized and loaded in memory so that recognition of complex dynamic scenes are perceived optimally. Precise identification of voices and linguistic objects are crucial for effective communication. However, the normal context of hearing contains multiple, competing and noisy sources. In such disadvantageous conditions the identity of the percepts is more efficient if they are stored in memory. The results of the present study offer experimental evidence that high-level cognitive processes might constrain basic auditory mechanisms involved in identifying phonemic tone to guarantee perceptual constancy. The results showing a better identification of tones in contexts that are inveresely proportional to their frequency support the idea that peripheral auditory processing enhances the identification of the tones by a general function of contextual contrast.

An acoustic study of laringeal contrast in three American Indian Languages

A contrast between modal and nonmodal phonation is commonly found in American Indian languages. The use of laryngealized voice has been reported in a number of languages from different linguistic families. This paper investigates the acoustics of laryngealized phonation in three indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, Yalalag Zapotec, Yucatec Maya, and Mixe. These languages differ in terms of the use of other features controlled by action of the larynx, i.e., tone. In Zapotec there is a contrast between high, low, and falling tones; Maya has phonemic high and low tones, whereas Mixe does not present phonemic pitch. The results show that the production of phonemic laryngeal vowels differs from language to language. The data suggest that the specific implementation of laryngealization depends in part on the relationship with contrastive tone. The patterns of the languages investigated provide new evidence of the possible synchronization of phonation throughout the vowel. With this evidence, a typology of modal/nonmodal phonation in phonation‐synchronizing languages is proposed.

Glottalized consonants in Oaxaca Chontal

Lowland Oaxaca Chontal, a language generally classified as Hokan and hence related to Yuman and Pomo languges, is now spoken by only a small percentage of the Chontal people who live on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca state, Mexico. Recordings were made of seven speakers in their 60’s to 80’s in December 2003. The language has a series of glottalized obstruents some of which which vary in production between fricative and affricate realizations. Our data show the labio‐dental and lateral are the most likely to have fricative realizations, the coronals are regularly affricates and the velar is regularly a stop. These segments are contrastive but morphologically related to the voiceless fricatives of the language. This is demonstrated by one common plural formation process which adds glottalization to a final consonant (e.g. /apix/ ‘‘stone,’’ /apik’/ ‘‘stones’’). After a vowel the same morpheme is realized as a glottal stop (e.g. /u/ ‘‘eye,’’ /u/ ‘‘eyes’’). However, not all sequences of voiceless fricative + glo...

Reference frame and scaling in the perception of pitch in a tone language

Listeners can make subtle judgments about the relative magnitudes of auditory objects but only rarely make judgments of the absolute size of speech stimuli. In a pioneering paper, and his first publication in 1957, Peter Ladefoged demonstrated that the relative size of the surrounding context affects the perception of vowel quality. Although, years later, Ladefoged showed that the effect is only valid under certain conditions, the effect is still a motivated perceptual phenomenon. In this paper, the role of the reference frame in the perception of pitch in Yalalag Zapotec is investigated. YZ has three phonemic tones, high, low, and falling. Minimal pairs of H and L tones were introduced by a carrier sentence. The experiment manipulated the F0 of the Zapotec equivalent sentence to ‘‘Please say what this word is,’’ while the target words were kept unmodified. Other things being equal, the only difference was the F0 of six versions of the introductory sentence. Preliminary results are analogous to Ladefoged’...