Vowel Acoustics of Nungon , Papua New Guinea (original) (raw)
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2016
This study presents the first acoustic description of the vowel space of a Papuan language – Nambo, spoken in southern Papua New Guinea – based on duration and first and second formant measurements from 19 adult male and female speakers across three age groups (young, middle-aged, senior). Phonemically, Nambo has six full vowels /i, e, æ, ɑ, o, u/ and a reduced vowel tentatively labeled /ə/. Unlike the full vowels, the quality of /ə/ showed great variation: seniors’ and young females’ realizations tended to be more open and retracted than those by young males, while middle-aged speakers’ productions fell between these two variants.
Kwomtari Phonology and Grammar Essentials [Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages Vol. 55]
2008
Papers in the series Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages express the authors' knowledge at the time of writing. They normally do not provide a comprehensive treatment of the topic and may contain analyses which will be modified at a later stage. However, given the large number of undescribed languages in Papua New Guinea, SIL-PNG feels that it is appropriate to make these research results available at this time.
The Effects of Prosodic Context and Word Position on Gupapuyngu Vowels
2012
This paper presents an acoustic analysis of vowels in a Northern Australian language, Gupapuyngu, in order to investigate whether vowels in CVCV words differ according to prosodic prominence and word position. It is shown that back vowels are produced with a narrower constriction when prosodically prominent and word-initial. However, in general, vowels tend not to be hyperarticulated under conditions of word-initial prosodic prominence. These results are interpreted in terms of perceptual distinctiveness and articulatory strengthening.
Exploratory study of Mɨnɨka oral vowels in oral stressed syllables: A case study
This paper provides evidence of the acoustic features of Mɨnɨka vowels, a variety of Uitoto spoken in La Chorrera, Amazonas. The purpose of the present study is to achieve a data‐oriented vowel description which will be a first step towards the description of Mɨnɨka phones acoustic properties. Following an instrumental approach, data were collected from one female speaker so a list of words with each vowel described in the phonology was made and acoustically analyzed to measure Formant 1 and Formant 2 (F1 – F2) to determine vowel quality. Each of the vowels analyzed followed a stressed CV pattern. Results show that even though [e] and [o] tend to be central, this is not significant to mark a real difference with what was described in the phonology. On the contrary, [a] is more central as the distance between F1 and F2 decreases to 500 Hz approximately. With respect to [u] and [i] F1 is around 300 – 400 Hz range which indicates a higher tongue position. Since F2 for [i] is around 2600 Hz region and greatly distant from F1, marking it out as a Front vowel. The small distance between F1 and F2 for [u] sound reflects that the tongue moves to the back region. For [ɨ] sound, F1 is in the same region as [u] but F2 is in the 1400 Hz – 1800 Hz region which correlates with its backness.
Languages in the Philippines, though almost all belonging to the Austronesian language family, have unique ways on how sounds and sound patterns are realized. The number of phonemic sounds varies in each language. The Pangasinan language, according to Richard Benton (1971), has five significant vowel phonemes namely /a/, /ɛ/, /ǝ/, /i/ and /ᴐ/ or /ʊ/, and 13 consonant phonemes. The quality of these phonemes changes depending on the phonetic environment. This study used a scientific approach in describing the vowels of Pangasinan according to their acoustic properties and depending on the environments they are found. These environments include stressed and unstressed positions. A software program was utilized to analyze the individual characteristics of these vowels. In general, this study contributes to the production and development of educational materials in teaching the Pangasinan language to its native speakers, and even to interested second language learners.
Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2015
ABSTRACT This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.
Tonal diversity in languages of Papua New Guinea
2000
Abstract Tone is well known in Asian and African languages, but less so in languages of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The major survey of New Guinean tone systems is Donohue (1997). The present paper introduces published and original data that support several types of tone systems of PNG, distinct from pitch-accent systems. Tone languages of PNG operate on either the word level or syllable level. Word-level tone languages operate in one of two ways.
Acoustic measurements of the Indonesian oral monophthongs produced by Acehnese speakers
Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 2024
This study explores the characteristics of Indonesian oral monophthong vowels produced by male and female language consultants in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, as their first language. Using purposive sampling, ten Acehnese males and ten Acehnese females were selected to articulate eight target vowels: /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ә/, /a/, /u/, /o/, and /ɔ/. Vowel measurements were obtained through recorded word elicitation, using a word list containing the target vowels. F1 and F2 frequencies in Hertz were determined and analyzed using Praat software to assess vowel qualities and subsequently converted to the Bark scale. Vowels were plotted on the F1/F2 formant space. The findings illustrate the distinct measurements of each Indonesian monophthong vowel by male and female consultants, represented in the vowel space. Male vowels generally exhibit higher and more centralized positioning, while female vowels appear more dispersed and lower. This research contributes valuable insights for comparing vowel systems across various languages and dialects spoken in multilingual Indonesia.
Predicting Vowel Systems: An Acoustic Analysis of the Vowels of Mebêngôkre and Panará
This paper has both a descriptive and a theoretical goal. The first is to provide novel typological data on two severely understudied languages of the Jê family, Mebêngôkre and Panará, through an acoustic analysis of the vowels of the two languages. The second is to determine whether the predictions made by the Dispersion-Focalization Theory of vowel systems (DFT, Schwartz et al. 1997a) can account for the organization of the vowel systems of these two languages. Acoustic results show that neither Mebêngôkre nor Panará has a true low nasal vowel, and that the acoustic space of the nasal vowel systems of both languages is reduced in the F1 dimension. The DFT fails to predict this typological observation, which is commonly observed in nasal vowel inventories of the world’s languages (Beddor 1982, Kingston 2007). The author proposes that the acoustic space of phonologically nasal vowels is constrained in the F1 dimension. This small modification to the DFT allows the principles governing the organization of oral vowel systems to apply normally in nasal vowels, albeit in a reduced space. This prediction is consistent with the data observed from natural languages, in which we observe a larger number of contrasts among the F2 dimension than the F1 dimension for nasal vowels.
An Acoustic Analysis of Central Vowels in Malaysian Hokkien
This study describes and examines the acoustic properties of the central vowels [ɨ] and [ ] in Malaysian Hokkien (MH). The two central vowels are typologically special in that both of them are “full-fledged”, phonemic vowels in an inventory. Therefore our main research question is to see if the two central vowels are subject to contextual influences, just like their counterparts in other languages (e.g. [2, 6, 8, 9]). Our principal finding is that no significant contextual variability is attested, indicating that central vowels may be resistant to coarticulatory effects, even though they are unreduced. While [8]’s results showed substantial contextual variations of the phonemic vowel [ɨ] in Korean, which casts doubt on a duration-based account [6, 9], our results instead suggest that central vowels may not necessarily be targetless [2].