Acoustics of the tense-lax stop contrast in Semarang Javanese

Abstract

Javanese has a contrast between tense and lax stops. While both tense and lax stops are voiceless and unaspirated, the contrast at least in word-initial position is realized through acoustic differences in the following vowel, including lower f0, breathier voice quality, and higher F1 for the lax stops relative to their tense counterparts. However, previous reports have indicated substantial cross-speaker variation, and in some cases involve differing characterizations of the acoustic contrast, possibly due to small sample sizes. Moreover, it is still unclear whether (and how) this contrast is maintained in word-final position. In this study, we investigate the tense-lax contrast based on audio recordings of 27 speakers of Central Javanese from Semarang, Indonesia who each read 30 or more items with a word-initial or word-final stop in a carrier phrase. Stops and their adjacent vowels were hand-annotated, and measurements were taken including voice onset and offset time, stop closure and release duration, f0, formant frequencies, and spectral tilt and noise levels. Discussion will focus on how the tense-lax contrast is realized in both word-initial and word-final positions, as well as how different acoustic correlates co-vary within and across speakers.

The phonetic properties of the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese

“…Both measures are predicted to be lower in breathier phonation than in modal phonation. HNR and/or CPP are useful for distinguishing phonation contrasts in many languages, including Chong (Blankenship, 2002), Jalapa Mazatec (Blankenship, 2002;Garellek & Keating, 2011), Ju|'hoansi (Miller, 2007), Southern Yi (Kuang, 2011), White Hmong (Esposito, 2012), Gujarati (Khan, 2012;Nara, 2017), Marathi (Berkson, 2019), Mon (Abramson, Tiede, & Luangthongkum, 2015), Chichimeco (Kelterer, 2017) and Semarang Javanese (Seyfarth, Vander Klok, & Garellek, 2017).…”

Acoustic correlates of plosive voicing in Madurese

“…However, a small percentage of /D/-series plosives were sometimes devoiced in this context, probably due to the presence of a preceding voiceless fricative in the carrier phrase. of the tense/lax or stiff/slack distinction in Javanese (Fagan, 1988;Seyfarth et al, 2017), but none of the speakers in our sample reported any fluency in this language.…”

“…5 Subsequently, articulatory maneuvers to sustain voicing for both the latter series could have conditioned the perceptually (Lotto et al, 1997) and typologically (Denning, 1989) expected changes in vowel height. Once the vowel height differences were phonologized, the redundant voicing for what is now the /TH/ series could be lost or variably realized (Brunelle et al, 2019;Seyfarth et al, 2017) (although recall that we did not find any evidence for variable realization in this data sample). The introduction of (something there was prestige associated with accurate pronunciation of borrowed items (cf.…”