SUSANNE FUCHS , MARTINE TODA & MARZENA ŻYGIS (eds.), Turbulent sounds: An interdisciplinary guide (Interface Explorations). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. Pp. v + 384. ISBN: 9783110226577

Abstract

Turbulent Sounds is an excellent collection of articles that address the broader phonetic and phonological processes affecting turbulent sounds, namely, stops, affricates and fricatives, classically referred to as obstruents. In this collection, the editors have successfully brought together several aspects central to the understanding of turbulence in obstruents, ranging from their acoustic manifestation, phonological representations and aerodynamics to their articulation. The volume consists of ten articles that cover much of the gamut of experimental modalities that help shape our understanding of these classes of segments. The data for the articles come from an impressive list of unrelated languages that exhibit interesting contrasts; laryngeal contrasts in Korean fricatives, ejectives in several Caucasian languages, N|uu clicks, preaspiration in Scottish English fricatives, Hungarian and Slovak labiodental fricatives, and Polish sibilants. The editors have taken care to include articles that investigate acoustic phonetic, aerodynamic, electropalatographic, ultrasound and MRI data on turbulence, thus providing an overview of the subject. The preface is correct in pointing out the distinct ways of describing fricatives acoustically and the need to follow an interdisciplinary approach to gain a complete understanding of the inner workings of obstruents and the associated turbulence (p. vi). Susanne Fuchs & Martine Toda explore the relationship between biological and sociophonetic factors influencing the production of /s/ and Fiona E. Gibbon & Alice Lee explore the impact of structural abnormalities, such as cleft-palate on the production of turbulence. T. A. Hall & MarzenaŻygis open the volume with an extensive phonological description of stops, affricates and fricatives, especially the treatment of this sub-category of obstruents within the broader distinctive feature theory. covering phonological processes that involve this group of segments and rules that alter features they underscore the need for augmenting feature theory with phonetic evidence that better explains certain processes. John J. Ohala & Maria-Josep Sol ⁄ e contribute to the latter goal by presenting evidence from aerodynamic and palatographic studies of obstruents. They highlight purely generative phonological approaches, such as feature geometry and Optimality Theory, which fail to explain dependency patterns between frication and voicelessness. Convincingly, they point to several processes such as an interaction between articulatory gestures (interarticulatory timing within and between segments) and acoustic-auditory principles, which account for emergent stops between sonorant clusters (p. 75) and stridency in sonorants when they are devoiced (p. 42). Zsuzsanna B ⁄ ark ⁄ anyi & Zolt ⁄ an Kiss' study of the Hungarian and Slovak voiced labiodental fricative, /v/, supports the claim that articulatory and aerodynamic properties of /v/ explain the phonological patterning of this segment with respect to assimilatory processes, wherein the /v/ is ...

Pre-aspiration and the problem of zeroes: Phonological rules can be variable

“…Firstly, we do not in fact have the perceptual evidence relevant for most pre-aspirating languages. Gordeeva & Scobbie (2010) use perceptual evidence available for Norwegian for analyses of English pre-aspiration. We can expect perceptual thresholds to vary from language to language (and from accent to accent).…”