Voice Onset Time in a language without voicing contrast: an acoustic analysis of Blackfoot oral stops
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Date
2024
Authors
Genee, Inge
Li, Fangfang
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Abstract
This paper presents an acoustic analysis of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in oral stop consonants
in Blackfoot, an Algonquian language without contrastive voicing. We focus on
VOT as one of the key temporal acoustic correlates of voicing and investigate VOT variation
in relation to (i) place of articulation (labial vs. alveolar vs. velar); (ii) length (long vs.
short), quality (/a/ vs. /o/), and accent pattern (accented vs. unaccented) of the following
vowel; (iii) word position (initial vs. medial); (iv) gender; and (v) age. We analyzed 2096
stop consonant tokens produced by 13 participants, who completed two different tasks:
an English-to-Blackfoot translation task and a picture naming task. The key findings are
as follows: (i) Blackfoot stop consonants fall into the short-lag range that overlaps with
the English voiced category, with mean VOT values ranging from 11.6–32.7 ms; (ii) VOT
values become progressively longer as the place of articulation moves to more posterior
positions; (iii) VOT values are longer before high vowels than before low vowels; (iv) VOT
values are longer before long vowels than before short vowels; (v) no statistically significant
effect was found for the linguistic factors word position and accent pattern; (vi) no
statistically significant effect was found for the socio-indexical factors age and gender;
and (vii) no statistically significant effect was found for the experimental factor task type.
The implications of our findings for the Blackfoot writing system and ongoing work on
language documentation and revitalization are briefly discussed.
Description
Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND) applies
Keywords
Voice Onset Time , Blackfoot oral stop consonants , Voicing contrast , Acoustic analysis , Oral stops , Stop consonants , Blackfoot language
Citation
Genee, I., & Li, F. (2024). Voice Onset Time in a language without voicing contrast: An acoustic analysis of Blackfoot oral stops. Journal of the International Phonetic Assocation, 54(1), 33-51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100323000051