Andy Butcher | Flinders University of South Australia (original) (raw)

Papers by Andy Butcher

Research paper thumbnail of Sound patterns of Australian languages

[Extract] At the beginning of his seminal review of the phonological characteristics of Australia... more [Extract] At the beginning of his seminal review of the phonological characteristics of Australian languages, Evans (1995a: 723) refers to the "classical period" in the description of Australian language sound systems from the late sixties to the early eighties e.g. Capell 1967, Dixon 1980, Blake 1981, Yallop 1982). A definitive summary of Australian sound systems is also included in Dixon (2002: Ch 12). From this body of work has emerged a general picture of some of the hallmark traits of Australian language sound patterns. Some of the key features of Australian languages are that they have complex consonant inventories with multiple place of articulation contrasts in the stop and sonorant series, a notable lack of contrastive fricatives or a stop voicing contrast, coupled with small vowel inventories (e.g. see also Capell 1967; Yallop 1982; Blake 1981). In the last twenty years, research largely undertaken within the segmental descriptive tradition, has been augmented with a growing body of experimental phonetic analysis that has looked at a range of phonological and phonetic phenomena ranging from the acoustic features of vowel inventories to intonation. This chapter aims to introduce the reader to some of the salient phonetic and phonological features of Australian languages, beginning with an overview of segmental properties, and finishing with a survey of connected speech processes, stress and prosodic prominence, and intonational phenomena. While most phonetic and phonological interest has focused on the characteristics of the consonant inventories and metrical stress patterns, a range of newer analyses have been conducted on hitherto neglected features of Australian languages, namely the vowel inventories, consonant coarticulation, and aspects of post-lexical phonetics and phonology, including intonation, rhythm and other temporal patterns such as pausing and tempo variation. The results of these studies are summarised in the sections that follow.

Research paper thumbnail of Phonology and hearing: could Australian Aboriginal languages be acoustically easier to hear than English by listeners with OME-induced hearing impairment?

Australian Hearing Hub Inaugural Conference: Language, Literacy & Cognition in Children with Hearing Impairment, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of An electro-palatographic study of consonant sequences in Iwaidja

An EPG (electro-palatographic) corpus of Iwaidja consonant sequences was examined to investigate ... more An EPG (electro-palatographic) corpus of Iwaidja consonant sequences was examined to investigate global consonant timing patterns and the extent of coarticulation and coproduction in nasal+stop and lateral+stop clusters. As observed in other Australian languages (e.g. Warlpiri), there was limited anticipatory coarticulation in certain heterorganic sequences and evidence of coarticulatory resistance in others. Furthermore lateral clusters patterned differently from nasal clusters. In addition to biomechanical constraints implied by the DAC (Degree of Articulatory Constraint) model, phonological structures of the language including place and manner features clearly influence the extent of coproduction and subsequent spatial modification of consonant gestures in Iwaidja consonant sequences.

Research paper thumbnail of Obstruent and rhotic contrasts in Adnyamathanha, a language of South Australia

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of The Big Australian Speech Corpus (The Big ASC)

Research paper thumbnail of Revisiting the Pressure Impulse in Australian Languages: Bininj Gun-wok

This study is an aerodynamic analysis of medial stop articulation in Bininj Gun-wok (BGW). Like m... more This study is an aerodynamic analysis of medial stop articulation in Bininj Gun-wok (BGW). Like many northern Australian languages, BGW has two stop series found in word medial, intervocalic position, at all places of articulation with no contrast for voicing or voice onset time. Acoustic and aerodynamic recordings of four speakers of the Kunwinjku dialect of BGW were recorded under field conditions in a remote community of Arnhem Land. Three repetitions of real Kunwinjku words were recorded within a carrier phrase. The analysis includes the measurement of peak intra-oral pressure (Po) over time which is termed the Pressure Impulse (PI) after Malécot. Results show that peak pressure and consonant duration are independent parameters and that while lenis and fortis stops differ in terms of duration and peak intra-oral pressure, they attain the maximum pressure peak at a similar time after closure. Pressure Impulse measurements also differentiate the stop types and furthermore, results...

Research paper thumbnail of The vowels of Australian Aboriginal English

Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the ... more Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the indigenous substrate, may have a very restricted set of vowels compared to Standard Australian English (SAE). A comparison of the vowels of a small group of acrolectal AAE speakers with those of the standard accent suggests that even in varieties with the same set of phonemes as SAE, speakers are using a somewhat smaller phonetic vowel space. The lower boundaries of the AAE and indigenous language spaces are very similar and, whereas the SAE vowel space represents an expansion in all directions compared with the indigenous space, the AAE space represents an expansion in an 'upward' (lower F 1) direction only. Within their respective spaces, the relative positions of the monophthongs are quite similar in SAE and AAE. Diphthong trajectories are also similar, except that some have shorter trajectories (more centralised second targets) in AAE. Most of the differences there are can be viewed as more conservative features in the AAE accent.

Research paper thumbnail of ‘Fortis/lenis' revisited one more time: the aerodynamics of some oral stop contrasts in three continents

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Sep 1, 2004

Research paper thumbnail of An electropalatographic investigation of coarticulation in VCV sequences

Journal of Phonetics, 1976

Research paper thumbnail of Underlying Representations in the Acquisition of Phonology: Evidence from ‘Before and After’ Speech

Whurr Publishers Ltd eBooks, Apr 15, 2008

Research paper thumbnail of Cross‐language EPG data on lingual asymmetry

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Nov 1, 1988

Research paper thumbnail of A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus

Research paper thumbnail of The special nature of Australian phonologies: Why auditory constraints on human language sound systems are not universal

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 2018

The phonological systems of human languages are constrained by what are often assumed to be unive... more The phonological systems of human languages are constrained by what are often assumed to be universal properties of human auditory perception. However, the atypical phonologies found in many hearingimpaired speakers (lack of voicing contrast, lack of fricatives) indicate that such constraints also operate at an individual level. Thus, if a large group of speakers in a speech community operates with an atypical auditory system over a number of generations, then it seems logical that the phonology of the language(s) spoken by such a community would also over time be influenced by the particular properties of that common auditory system. Over half of the Australian Aboriginal population develop chronic otitis media with effusion in infancy and 50-70% of Aboriginal children have a significant hearing loss at both the low and high ends of the frequency range. The majority of Australian languages have phonologies which are atypical in world terms, having no voicing distinction and no fricatives or affricates, but an unusually large number of places of articulation. Whilst there would seem to be no way of conclusively demonstrating a historical causal connection between atypical hearing profiles and atypical phonologies, this paper explores some of the minimal prerequisites for such a theory.

Research paper thumbnail of An instrumental analysis of focus and juncture in Warlpiri

Research paper thumbnail of Stop bursts in Pitjantjatjara

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Jul 20, 2015

Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /ptʈck/ in three v... more Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /ptʈck/ in three vowel contexts /aiu/. 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.

Research paper thumbnail of An EPG Study of Palatal Consonants in Two Australian Languages

Language and Speech, Apr 7, 2011

This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Austr... more This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Australian languages, Arrernte and Warlpiri. (Alveo-)palatal consonants are phonemic for stop, lateral and nasal manners of articulation in both languages, and are laminal articulations. However, in Arrernte, these lamino-(alveo-)palatals contrast with lamino-dental consonants for all three manners of articulation (i.e., it is a double-laminal language), whereas in Warlpiri this laminal contrast does not exist (i.e., it is a single-laminal language). Data are analyzed according to manner of articulation, vowel context and phrase position. Results suggest that in the double-laminal language Arrernte, the (alveo-)palatal articulation is further back than in the single-laminal language Warlpiri, presumably due to the presence of the lamino-dental in the Arrernte phoneme inventory. The lateral has the least contact in the back regions of the palate for both languages, but there is no significant difference in contact pattern between the stop and the nasal. However, results tentatively suggest that the nasal (alveo-)palatal is the most likely to show effects of prosodic or vocalic context, and it is suggested that this is due to the less strict airflow requirements for the nasal than for the stop or the lateral.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Back of the Tongue: Dorsal Sounds in Australian Languages

Phonetica, Mar 1, 2004

In this paper we provide an overview of dorsovelar articulations and acoustics in several Austral... more In this paper we provide an overview of dorsovelar articulations and acoustics in several Australian Aboriginal languages, and we compare these results with data from English. We examine languages that have a single dorsal, as well as languages that have two dorsal places of articulation. Using direct palatography and F2 transition measures, we show that Australian languages appear to have a distinct velar target for each of the three major vowel contexts, with a high degree of coarticulation between each velar allophone and its following vowel target, whilst English has only two velar targets – back and non-back, with a lower degree of coarticulation between velar allophones and their corresponding vowel targets. Thus, whilst the range of allophonic variation for velars extends further back in the Australian Aboriginal languages than in English, there appears to be no difference in the articulation of velars in the front vowel context. Drawing on results from the biomechanics, language acquisition, speech perception and acoustics literatures, we suggest that this result may be due to conflict between systemic constraints imposed by the place-rich consonant systems of Aboriginal languages and universal acoustic constraints on the identity of front-velar sounds, which may contribute to the instability of such articulations and the relative infrequency of velar + high vowel combinations in the world’s languages.

Research paper thumbnail of Obstruent and rhotic contrasts in Adnyamathanha, a language of South Australia

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Sep 1, 2018

Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South... more Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. It has a fairly complex consonant system with six places of articulation (including four coronals). Through a combination of traditional phonological analysis and acoustic phonetic measurement, we attempt to throw some light on one aspect of this complexity. We show that there is a contrast between two series of obstruents in intervocalic position, which sets Adnyamathanha apart from most other languages of the region-and of the Pama-Nyungan language family as a whole. The main phonetic correlates of the contrast are closure duration and presence versus absence of glottal pulsing during the closure. Voiceless obstruents are consistently realized as long stops, whereas their voiced counterparts, though always shorter, vary in duration and manner of articulation, depending on place of articulation. We analyze the voiced labial fricative as the voiced equivalent of the voiceless (bi)labial stop and we analyze the alveolar tap and the retroflex flap as voiced cognates of the voiceless alveolar and retroflex stops respectively. We conclude that this sound system is most appropriately analyzed in terms of a 'cline of contrast', rather than in terms of 'once a phoneme, always a phoneme.'

Research paper thumbnail of Nasal coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: An aerodynamic analysis

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Feb 12, 2019

Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipator... more Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipatory nasalization, as suggested by previous aerodynamic and acoustic analyses (Butcher 1999). The current study uses aerodynamic measurements of speech to investigate patterns of nasalization and nasal articulation in Bininj Kunwok to compare with Australian languages more generally. The role of nasal coarticulation in ensuring language comprehensibility a key question in phonetics research today is explored. Nasal aerodynamics is measured in intervocalic, word-medial nasals in the speech of five female speakers of BKw and data are analyzed using Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA) and Functional Data Analysis averaging techniques. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalization with no restriction on carryover nasalization for a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed until the oral release of a nasal for coronal articulations, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. Patterns of anticipatory nasalization appears similar to nasal airflow in French non-nasalized vowels in oral vowel plus nasal environments (Delvaux et al. 2008). Findings show that Bininj Kunwok speakers use language specific strategies in order to limit anticipatory nasalization, enhancing place of articulation cues at a site of intonational prominence which also is also the location of the majority of place of articulation contrasts within the language. Patterns of airflow suggest enhancement and coarticulatory resistance in prosodically prominent VN and VNC sequences which we interpret as evidence of speakers maintaining a phonological contrast to enhance place of articulation cues.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring coarticulation and variability in tongue contact patterns

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 1989

ABSTRACT Instrumental assessment of pathological speech is of limited use unless normal variabili... more ABSTRACT Instrumental assessment of pathological speech is of limited use unless normal variability can be quantitatively defined. An attempt was made to quantify the variability of tongue contact patterns at certain stages during the pronunciation of VCV sequences by a normal speaker, in terms of the contact totals registered by an electropalatograph system. Of specific interest were the total contact area during the vowels and the rate of change of contact for consonant closures and releases. The results are discussed in the light of some current theories of coarticulation and their implications for speech assessment.

Research paper thumbnail of Sound patterns of Australian languages

[Extract] At the beginning of his seminal review of the phonological characteristics of Australia... more [Extract] At the beginning of his seminal review of the phonological characteristics of Australian languages, Evans (1995a: 723) refers to the "classical period" in the description of Australian language sound systems from the late sixties to the early eighties e.g. Capell 1967, Dixon 1980, Blake 1981, Yallop 1982). A definitive summary of Australian sound systems is also included in Dixon (2002: Ch 12). From this body of work has emerged a general picture of some of the hallmark traits of Australian language sound patterns. Some of the key features of Australian languages are that they have complex consonant inventories with multiple place of articulation contrasts in the stop and sonorant series, a notable lack of contrastive fricatives or a stop voicing contrast, coupled with small vowel inventories (e.g. see also Capell 1967; Yallop 1982; Blake 1981). In the last twenty years, research largely undertaken within the segmental descriptive tradition, has been augmented with a growing body of experimental phonetic analysis that has looked at a range of phonological and phonetic phenomena ranging from the acoustic features of vowel inventories to intonation. This chapter aims to introduce the reader to some of the salient phonetic and phonological features of Australian languages, beginning with an overview of segmental properties, and finishing with a survey of connected speech processes, stress and prosodic prominence, and intonational phenomena. While most phonetic and phonological interest has focused on the characteristics of the consonant inventories and metrical stress patterns, a range of newer analyses have been conducted on hitherto neglected features of Australian languages, namely the vowel inventories, consonant coarticulation, and aspects of post-lexical phonetics and phonology, including intonation, rhythm and other temporal patterns such as pausing and tempo variation. The results of these studies are summarised in the sections that follow.

Research paper thumbnail of Phonology and hearing: could Australian Aboriginal languages be acoustically easier to hear than English by listeners with OME-induced hearing impairment?

Australian Hearing Hub Inaugural Conference: Language, Literacy & Cognition in Children with Hearing Impairment, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of An electro-palatographic study of consonant sequences in Iwaidja

An EPG (electro-palatographic) corpus of Iwaidja consonant sequences was examined to investigate ... more An EPG (electro-palatographic) corpus of Iwaidja consonant sequences was examined to investigate global consonant timing patterns and the extent of coarticulation and coproduction in nasal+stop and lateral+stop clusters. As observed in other Australian languages (e.g. Warlpiri), there was limited anticipatory coarticulation in certain heterorganic sequences and evidence of coarticulatory resistance in others. Furthermore lateral clusters patterned differently from nasal clusters. In addition to biomechanical constraints implied by the DAC (Degree of Articulatory Constraint) model, phonological structures of the language including place and manner features clearly influence the extent of coproduction and subsequent spatial modification of consonant gestures in Iwaidja consonant sequences.

Research paper thumbnail of Obstruent and rhotic contrasts in Adnyamathanha, a language of South Australia

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of The Big Australian Speech Corpus (The Big ASC)

Research paper thumbnail of Revisiting the Pressure Impulse in Australian Languages: Bininj Gun-wok

This study is an aerodynamic analysis of medial stop articulation in Bininj Gun-wok (BGW). Like m... more This study is an aerodynamic analysis of medial stop articulation in Bininj Gun-wok (BGW). Like many northern Australian languages, BGW has two stop series found in word medial, intervocalic position, at all places of articulation with no contrast for voicing or voice onset time. Acoustic and aerodynamic recordings of four speakers of the Kunwinjku dialect of BGW were recorded under field conditions in a remote community of Arnhem Land. Three repetitions of real Kunwinjku words were recorded within a carrier phrase. The analysis includes the measurement of peak intra-oral pressure (Po) over time which is termed the Pressure Impulse (PI) after Malécot. Results show that peak pressure and consonant duration are independent parameters and that while lenis and fortis stops differ in terms of duration and peak intra-oral pressure, they attain the maximum pressure peak at a similar time after closure. Pressure Impulse measurements also differentiate the stop types and furthermore, results...

Research paper thumbnail of The vowels of Australian Aboriginal English

Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the ... more Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the indigenous substrate, may have a very restricted set of vowels compared to Standard Australian English (SAE). A comparison of the vowels of a small group of acrolectal AAE speakers with those of the standard accent suggests that even in varieties with the same set of phonemes as SAE, speakers are using a somewhat smaller phonetic vowel space. The lower boundaries of the AAE and indigenous language spaces are very similar and, whereas the SAE vowel space represents an expansion in all directions compared with the indigenous space, the AAE space represents an expansion in an 'upward' (lower F 1) direction only. Within their respective spaces, the relative positions of the monophthongs are quite similar in SAE and AAE. Diphthong trajectories are also similar, except that some have shorter trajectories (more centralised second targets) in AAE. Most of the differences there are can be viewed as more conservative features in the AAE accent.

Research paper thumbnail of ‘Fortis/lenis' revisited one more time: the aerodynamics of some oral stop contrasts in three continents

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Sep 1, 2004

Research paper thumbnail of An electropalatographic investigation of coarticulation in VCV sequences

Journal of Phonetics, 1976

Research paper thumbnail of Underlying Representations in the Acquisition of Phonology: Evidence from ‘Before and After’ Speech

Whurr Publishers Ltd eBooks, Apr 15, 2008

Research paper thumbnail of Cross‐language EPG data on lingual asymmetry

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Nov 1, 1988

Research paper thumbnail of A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus

Research paper thumbnail of The special nature of Australian phonologies: Why auditory constraints on human language sound systems are not universal

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 2018

The phonological systems of human languages are constrained by what are often assumed to be unive... more The phonological systems of human languages are constrained by what are often assumed to be universal properties of human auditory perception. However, the atypical phonologies found in many hearingimpaired speakers (lack of voicing contrast, lack of fricatives) indicate that such constraints also operate at an individual level. Thus, if a large group of speakers in a speech community operates with an atypical auditory system over a number of generations, then it seems logical that the phonology of the language(s) spoken by such a community would also over time be influenced by the particular properties of that common auditory system. Over half of the Australian Aboriginal population develop chronic otitis media with effusion in infancy and 50-70% of Aboriginal children have a significant hearing loss at both the low and high ends of the frequency range. The majority of Australian languages have phonologies which are atypical in world terms, having no voicing distinction and no fricatives or affricates, but an unusually large number of places of articulation. Whilst there would seem to be no way of conclusively demonstrating a historical causal connection between atypical hearing profiles and atypical phonologies, this paper explores some of the minimal prerequisites for such a theory.

Research paper thumbnail of An instrumental analysis of focus and juncture in Warlpiri

Research paper thumbnail of Stop bursts in Pitjantjatjara

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Jul 20, 2015

Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /ptʈck/ in three v... more Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /ptʈck/ in three vowel contexts /aiu/. 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.

Research paper thumbnail of An EPG Study of Palatal Consonants in Two Australian Languages

Language and Speech, Apr 7, 2011

This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Austr... more This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Australian languages, Arrernte and Warlpiri. (Alveo-)palatal consonants are phonemic for stop, lateral and nasal manners of articulation in both languages, and are laminal articulations. However, in Arrernte, these lamino-(alveo-)palatals contrast with lamino-dental consonants for all three manners of articulation (i.e., it is a double-laminal language), whereas in Warlpiri this laminal contrast does not exist (i.e., it is a single-laminal language). Data are analyzed according to manner of articulation, vowel context and phrase position. Results suggest that in the double-laminal language Arrernte, the (alveo-)palatal articulation is further back than in the single-laminal language Warlpiri, presumably due to the presence of the lamino-dental in the Arrernte phoneme inventory. The lateral has the least contact in the back regions of the palate for both languages, but there is no significant difference in contact pattern between the stop and the nasal. However, results tentatively suggest that the nasal (alveo-)palatal is the most likely to show effects of prosodic or vocalic context, and it is suggested that this is due to the less strict airflow requirements for the nasal than for the stop or the lateral.

Research paper thumbnail of On the Back of the Tongue: Dorsal Sounds in Australian Languages

Phonetica, Mar 1, 2004

In this paper we provide an overview of dorsovelar articulations and acoustics in several Austral... more In this paper we provide an overview of dorsovelar articulations and acoustics in several Australian Aboriginal languages, and we compare these results with data from English. We examine languages that have a single dorsal, as well as languages that have two dorsal places of articulation. Using direct palatography and F2 transition measures, we show that Australian languages appear to have a distinct velar target for each of the three major vowel contexts, with a high degree of coarticulation between each velar allophone and its following vowel target, whilst English has only two velar targets – back and non-back, with a lower degree of coarticulation between velar allophones and their corresponding vowel targets. Thus, whilst the range of allophonic variation for velars extends further back in the Australian Aboriginal languages than in English, there appears to be no difference in the articulation of velars in the front vowel context. Drawing on results from the biomechanics, language acquisition, speech perception and acoustics literatures, we suggest that this result may be due to conflict between systemic constraints imposed by the place-rich consonant systems of Aboriginal languages and universal acoustic constraints on the identity of front-velar sounds, which may contribute to the instability of such articulations and the relative infrequency of velar + high vowel combinations in the world’s languages.

Research paper thumbnail of Obstruent and rhotic contrasts in Adnyamathanha, a language of South Australia

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Sep 1, 2018

Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South... more Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. It has a fairly complex consonant system with six places of articulation (including four coronals). Through a combination of traditional phonological analysis and acoustic phonetic measurement, we attempt to throw some light on one aspect of this complexity. We show that there is a contrast between two series of obstruents in intervocalic position, which sets Adnyamathanha apart from most other languages of the region-and of the Pama-Nyungan language family as a whole. The main phonetic correlates of the contrast are closure duration and presence versus absence of glottal pulsing during the closure. Voiceless obstruents are consistently realized as long stops, whereas their voiced counterparts, though always shorter, vary in duration and manner of articulation, depending on place of articulation. We analyze the voiced labial fricative as the voiced equivalent of the voiceless (bi)labial stop and we analyze the alveolar tap and the retroflex flap as voiced cognates of the voiceless alveolar and retroflex stops respectively. We conclude that this sound system is most appropriately analyzed in terms of a 'cline of contrast', rather than in terms of 'once a phoneme, always a phoneme.'

Research paper thumbnail of Nasal coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: An aerodynamic analysis

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Feb 12, 2019

Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipator... more Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipatory nasalization, as suggested by previous aerodynamic and acoustic analyses (Butcher 1999). The current study uses aerodynamic measurements of speech to investigate patterns of nasalization and nasal articulation in Bininj Kunwok to compare with Australian languages more generally. The role of nasal coarticulation in ensuring language comprehensibility a key question in phonetics research today is explored. Nasal aerodynamics is measured in intervocalic, word-medial nasals in the speech of five female speakers of BKw and data are analyzed using Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA) and Functional Data Analysis averaging techniques. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalization with no restriction on carryover nasalization for a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed until the oral release of a nasal for coronal articulations, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. Patterns of anticipatory nasalization appears similar to nasal airflow in French non-nasalized vowels in oral vowel plus nasal environments (Delvaux et al. 2008). Findings show that Bininj Kunwok speakers use language specific strategies in order to limit anticipatory nasalization, enhancing place of articulation cues at a site of intonational prominence which also is also the location of the majority of place of articulation contrasts within the language. Patterns of airflow suggest enhancement and coarticulatory resistance in prosodically prominent VN and VNC sequences which we interpret as evidence of speakers maintaining a phonological contrast to enhance place of articulation cues.

Research paper thumbnail of Measuring coarticulation and variability in tongue contact patterns

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 1989

ABSTRACT Instrumental assessment of pathological speech is of limited use unless normal variabili... more ABSTRACT Instrumental assessment of pathological speech is of limited use unless normal variability can be quantitatively defined. An attempt was made to quantify the variability of tongue contact patterns at certain stages during the pronunciation of VCV sequences by a normal speaker, in terms of the contact totals registered by an electropalatograph system. Of specific interest were the total contact area during the vowels and the rate of change of contact for consonant closures and releases. The results are discussed in the light of some current theories of coarticulation and their implications for speech assessment.