Kenneth S. Olson

Articulation of the Kagayanen interdental approximant: An ultrasound study

This paper documents the articulation of the interdental approximant, an unusual speech sound that occurs in several languages spoken in the Philippines and Western Australia. This sound is notable for the fact that the tongue protrudes from the mouth and contacts the lower lip, and it seems to have a lateral perceptual quality, but documentation of the other details of the sound have been sketchy. We use ultrasound imaging to study the sound produced by a speaker of Kagayanen. We show that the only constriction is interdental, that the degree of tongue protrusion is related to vowel context and focus, and that the sound does not involve tongue raising. Coronal section images indicate that the sound involves the lowering of at least one side of the tongue, making it articulatorily lateral. We also discuss the implications for theories of tongue movement.

The phonetic status of the labial flap

The labial flap is a speech sound which has received little attention in the literature. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, including audio and video data from Mono (D.R. Congo, Ubangian). The sound is attested in over sixty languages and has been incorporated into the phonological system of at least a dozen of them. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters, and it appears to have arisen independently in at least two regions of the world. These factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Ngbugu digital wordlist: A test case for best practices in archiving and presenting language documentation

Language documentation faces challenges of data preservation and accessibility. Data can be lost due to physical deterioration (e.g. field notes or tape recordings) or outdated format (e.g. Microsoft Word 3.0). Archived data is typically difficult to access, and it is sometimes found that the archived information is inadequate for research purposes. Increased interest in language documentation has coincided with advancements in digital technologies, offering hope for meeting these challenges. This paper discusses the archiving of a 204-item wordlist of Ngbugu, an Ubangian language spoken in Central African Republic, employing best practice recommendations. Our solution includes: TIFF digital imaging of the original handwritten transcription, WAV digital recording of the wordlist, descriptive markup encoding of the wordlist in XML employing Unicode transcription, viewing and playback via an XSLT style sheet that renders the information in HTML, publishing metadata for resource discovery with the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), and depositing the original materials and digital representations in an institutional archive committed to long-term preservation and access.

The phonetic status of the (inter)dental approximant

The (inter)dental approximant is a little-studied speech sound in the Philippines and Western Australia. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, providing acoustic and video data from Kagayanen and Limos Kalinga, respectively. The sound is attested in at least fifteen languages. It is contrastive in five Western Australian languages, while in the Philippines it generally patterns as an allophone of / l / but has emerged recently as a separate phoneme due to contact. It arose independently in the two regions. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters. All of these factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Acoustic properties of the interdental approximant in Kagayanen

This paper describes the acoustic properties of the interdental approximant, a rare speech sound reported to date only in a dozen languages in the Philippines. The measurements analyzed here are based on recordings of one female speaker of Kagayanen. The interdental approximant exhibits acoustic characteristics typical of semi‐vowels: the formant pattern is similar to that of vowels, and the formant transitions with adjoining vowels have a long duration, usually 35 ms or more. The values of F2 and F3 are analogous to those of the Kagayanen [l], a prototypical voiced alveolar lateral; the only significant formant value difference between the two sounds involves F1: the interdental approximant has a mean of 508 Hz (n=9), whereas the mean for [l] is 368 Hz (n=9). On the other hand, while these two segments sound impressionistically similar, the interdental approximant differs acoustically from [l] in several other respects as well: there is no abrupt change in the formant pattern at the junctures with adjoin...

A crosslinguistic lexicon of the labial flap

We provide a large sample of the occurrences of the labial flap in the worlds languages, including audio and video data from the Mono dialect of Mid-Southern Banda. This sample provides the evidence for Olson and Hajeks (2003) crosslinguistic generalizations concerning the articulation, the geographic distribution, the genetic distribution, and the phonological status of the speech sound.

Effects of context and speaking rate on liquid–stop sequences: A reassessment of traditional acoustic cues

The allophonic variation of liquids in American English prompted a study examining the findings of Mann [Percept. Psychophys. 28, 407–412 (1980)], Fowler etal . [Percept. Psychophys. 48, 559–570 (1990)], and Liberman [Speech (1996)], who used the F3 transition as the primary cue for synthesizing [da] vs [ga] following [al] and [ar]. The disyllables /al–da/, /al–ga/, /ar–da/, and /ar–ga/ were recorded in a carrier sentence by two male and two female speakers of midwestern English at three different speaking rates, and the spectra and durations of the liquids, stops, and vowels were analyzed. Acoustic analyses indicate structural variation: The F3 transitions of [da] and [ga] by themselves are not stable correlates in these contexts, notwithstanding data used in arguments for the perceptual invariance of articulatory gestures in liquid–stop sequences. Regularities were also found: The liquids systematically affect the F2 and F3 of the vowel in the following stop–vowel sequence, not only the onset value of F...

Ngbugu digital wordlist: Presentation form

This paper presents a 204-item digital wordlist of Ngbugu, an Ubangian language spoken in Central African Republic. The wordlist includes orthographic and broad phonetic transcriptions of the words, French and English glosses, an individual WAV recording of each word, GIF images of the original field transcriptions, and metadata for resource discovery. This presentation form of the wordlist was generated from an archived version (Olson 2006) following the procedure laid out in Simons, Olson and Frank (2007).

Mono Digital Wordlist: Presentation Form

This paper presents a 204-item digital wordlist of Mono, an Ubangian language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.1 The wordlist includes orthographic and broad phonetic transcriptions of each word, French and English glosses, an individual WAV recording of each item, GIF images of the original field transcriptions, and metadata for resource discovery. An archival form of the wordlist was deposited into an institutional archive (the SIL Language and Culture Archives) and includes the original WAV digital recording, descriptive markup encoding of the wordlist in XML employing Unicode 5.1 transcription, TIFF images of the original field transcriptions, and the metadata record. The presentation form was then generated directly from the archival form.