Acoustic Measurement of Voiced Implosives: Evidence of Voiced Implosives in a U.S. Dialect (original) (raw)
2017, Southern Journal of Linguistics
Prior literature has suggested the existence of implosive characteristics in the voiced stops of certain American English dialects (Jasewicz, Fox and Lyle 2009), but no serious research has been conducted to uncover this variation. The study of consonantal variation has typically relied on auditory coding (Thomas 2011) and implosives, in particular, are under-studied. All prior work on implosives involves articulatory measurements that require specialized apparatuses and live subjects, with no established methods to determine or even define 'implosivity' of voiced stops based on acoustic measurements. In this study, we have used Ladefoged and Maddieson's description of the acoustic waveform of a typical implosive and a typical plosive to propose a method that acoustically differentiates between plosive-like and implosive-like stops on a continuum (1996). Our method involves examining the voicing waveform of the occlusion period just before the stop release. A positive slope of the trend-line plotted for this waveform indicates an overall increase in amplitude during the occlusion period, and suggests that the stop is implosive-like. We then take the ratio of the voicing amplitude peak just before the stop release and the overall peak of the same waveform. The closer this ratio is to 1, the more implosive-like the stop will be. A combination of the slope of trend-line and the ratio of peaks in the occlusion period provides enough information for classifying a stop as plosive-like or implosive-like on a continuum. We successfully applied this method to study an American English dialect spoken in Hickory, North Carolina to uncover the variation in its voiced stops. We hope that our methods developed in this study, open up a new line of research that can further our understanding of consonantal diversity across American English dialects and the associated sociophonetic and sociolinguistic factors including language contact.
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