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Papers by Vicki Krebs

Section 1. Introduction Mangetti Dune !Xung is a "Khoesan" language in the Kx'a family (Heine & H... more Section 1. Introduction Mangetti Dune !Xung is a "Khoesan" language in the Kx'a family (Heine & Honken 2010) spoken by approximately 500 speakers in Mangetti Dune village in Namibia. Khoesan is no longer considered a language family (Guldemann & Vossen 2000); however, I use it here as a term that describes click languages that are also both non-Bantu and non-Cushitic. Mangetti Dune !Xung also has a population of speakers in Schmittsdrift, South Africa, and it was originally spoken in Angola. Mangetti Dune !Xung is an under-documented language that uses clicks as the primary and most common consonants. As I will show, fricatives are not very common in the language overall, occurring in only 11% of the 974 words that have been recorded in the Mangetti Dune !Xung word database (Augumes et al. 2010), and approximants are equally as uncommon as fricatives (occurring in 10% of the words in the database). In this paper, I seek to increase the documented information on Mangetti Dune !Xung by describing the language's fricative and approximant inventory, their positions in known words, and how these sounds pattern phonologically with different vowels. An experiment has also been performed to explore phonetic differences in word position on fricatives and approximants in Mangetti Dune !Xung in order to assess if a phonetic basis exists for positional constraints on fricatives and approximants similar to the BVC in Khoekhoe, another Khoesan language. In Mangetti Dune !Xung, stronger fricatives, such as stridents and gutturals seem to primarily occur in word initial position and other, weaker, consonants occur primarily in word medial position. In this aim, I measured acoustic and articulatory attributes that have, in previous research, signaled place and manner of articulation. In this paper, I will also describe how these variables contribute of 3 55 of 4 55 Section 2. Literature Review Section 2.1 Surveying the Inventories of Related Languages Brugman (2009) discussed the phoneme inventory of Khoekhoe. Another Khoesan language, Khoekhoe is spoken by approximately 250,000 people within Namibia, South Africa

We present 114 fps lingual ultrasound data of 3 speakers' productions of words containing the ini... more We present 114 fps lingual ultrasound data of 3 speakers' productions of words containing the initial velar plosive, and the following [ɑ] and [i] vowels, in Mangetti Dune !Xung (N=95 for [k] in the [ɑ] context, N=36 for [k] in the [i] context). We traced the midsaggital tongue edge at the frame just prior to the [k] release, and measured the tongue dorsum (TD) and tongue root (TR) constriction locations (CL's). The TRCL was measured 1 cm below the [k] peak. Results show that [k] in the [i] context has a 1.1 cm further forward TDCL than [k] in the [ɑ] context for one speaker, and 1.2 cm further forward for the second speaker The results are similar to those found for English by Stevens and House (1963). The TRCL is retracted 0.3 cm in [k] in the [ɑ] context compared with [k] in the [i] context for the first speaker, and 0.6 cm more retracted for the second speaker. A third speaker had a retracted TDCL and TRCL in both vowel contexts. These results confirm that [k] is less resistant to coarticulation. Results show that the tongue root is involved in dorsal-front vowel coarticulation.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013