2015/07/20 by Marija Tabain, Andrew Butcher · 13 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · Computer Science · Mathematics · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Vowel #Formant #Place of articulation #Context (archaeology) #Contrast (vision) #Sound change #Focus (optics) #Linguistics #Mid vowel #Stop consonant #Mathematics #Geography #Consonant #Computer science #Physics
paper · doi:10.1017/s0025100315000110
published in Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45(2), 149-176 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2015/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation / p t ʈ c k / in three vowel contexts / a i u /. We present word-medial stop burst data from nine speakers, examining duration, formant, spectral moment and spectral tilt measures. Our particular focus is on the apical contrast (alveolar / t / vs. retroflex /ʈ/) and on the alveo-palatal / c / vs. velar / k / contrast. We observe differences between the palatal and the velar depending on vowel context, and we discuss the possible aerodynamic and acoustic sources for these differences. By contrast, we find that differences between the alveolar and the retroflex are minimal in all three vowel contexts. Unexpectedly, in the context of / i /, various spectral measures suggest that the articulatory release for the retroflex /ʈ/ is in fact more anterior than the release for the alveolar / t / – we discuss this result in terms of possible articulatory overshoot of the target for /ʈ/ before / i /, and suggest that this result provides additional explanation for the cross-linguistic rarity of retroflexes in an / i / vowel context.