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Acoustic Cue Overlap and the Parsing of Paradigmatic Slots: Functional

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Acoustic Cue Overlap and the Parsing of Paradigmatic Slots: Functional ITRW on Temporal Integration in ISCA Archive the Perception of Speech http://www.iscaĆspeech.org/archive AixĆenĆProvence, France April 8Ć10, 2002 P1-17 Acoustic cue overlap and the parsing of paradigmatic slots: Functional basis of a guttural OCP constraint Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, U.S.A. [email protected] The Khoesan language Ju|’hoansi has a rich set of phonation type contrasts on consonants and vowels, as well as a three-way timing contrast in breathiness and epiglottalization, as shown in (1). These consonants and vowels form a natural class of guttural sounds, which is targeted by a co-occurrence constraint active in roots. (1) Consonant Gloss 1st Mora Gloss Both Moras Gloss Modal aa (H) ‘to warm hands’ Breathy <#aa (H) ‘meat’ <aha (SL-L) ‘to run’ !ahah (SL) ‘korhaan’ Glottalized !aan (L) ‘to catch up’ !a'a (SL L) ‘dry season’ ____ Uvularized aa (L) ‘moist sand’ ____ ____ Epiglottalized !kX’aa (L) ‘to dry out’ a÷a (SL L) ‘to hold !aa÷ (SL) ‘iron’ !kX’aa (H) ‘to wash’ down’ a÷ = epiglottalized vowel a = breathy vowel Tones are in parentheses I report the results of an acoustic investigation of voice quality cues associated with Ju|’hoansi gutturals (Miller- Ockhuizen 2001). The study shows that the spectral slopes measured via H1-H2 (Bickley 1982) and cepstral peak gamnitude (Hillenbrand et al. 1994) associated with the parallel consonants and vowels in each row in (1) are similar in magnitude and in dynamics throughout the vowel. Epiglottalized and glottalized vowels exhibit low spectral slopes, while breathy vowels exhibit high spectral slopes. Guttural coarticulation results in high spectral slopes in vowels following aspirated and uvularized consonants and low spectral slopes in vowels following glottalized and epiglottalized consonants. Guttural co-articulation in Ju|’hoansi affects the voice quality of the entire following vowel, resulting in the same levels of noise and spectral slope values throughout the vowel. Therefore, if both guttural consonants and vowels were to co-occur within the same root, there would be no cues to differentiate a sequence such as an aspirated consonant followed by a modal vowel from a sequence of an aspirated consonant followed by a breathy vowel. The language avoids ambiguity in the parsing of acoustic cues to paradigmatic slots by ruling out the combination of guttural consonants and vowels within a single root through a guttural OCP constraint. Evidence for the perceptual basis of the constraint can be gleamed from Ju|’hoansi listeners’ misperceptions of M.D. !Xung words containing guttural consonants and vowels, such as tS!oo÷ ‘to be blunt’, as containing only guttural vowels. This may also indicate an effect of Ju|’hoansi phonology on these listeners’ perceptual systems (Hume and Johnson 2001). Bickley, C. (1982) Acoustic analysis and perception of breathy vowels. MIT: Research Laboratory of Electronics: Speech Communication Group Working Papers 1, 71-82. Hillenbrand, J., Cleveland, R.A., and Erickson, R.L. (1994) Acoustic characteristics of breathy voice quality. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 769-778. Hume, E.V., and Johnson, K. (2001) A model of the interplay of speech perception and phonology. In E.V. Hume and K. Johnson (eds.) The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology. New York: Academic Press. Miller-Ockhuizen, A. (2001) Grounding Ju|’hoansi Root Phonotactics: The Phonetics of the Guttural OCP and other Acoustic Modulations. Ohio State University: Unpublished PhD dissertation in Linguistics. .
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