Sarvasy Hannah, Elvin Jaydene, Li Weicong, Escudero Paola
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, New South Wales 2751, Australia.
Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno, 5245 North Backer, M/S PB92, Fresno, California 93740, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Apr;147(4):2891. doi: 10.1121/10.0001003.
This study is a comprehensive acoustic description and analysis of the six vowels /i e a u o ɔ/ in the Towet dialect of the Papuan language Nungon ⟨yuw⟩ of northeastern Papua New Guinea. Vowel tokens were extracted from a corpus of audio speech recordings created for general language documentation and grammatical description. To assess the phonetic correlates of a claimed phonological vowel length distinction, vowel duration was measured. Multi-point acoustic analyses enabled investigation of mean vowel F1, F2, and F3; vowel trajectories, and coarticulation effects. The three Nungon back vowels were of particular interest, as they contribute to an asymmetrical, back vowel-heavy array, and /o/ had previously been described as having an especially low F2. The authors found that duration of phonologically long and short vowels differed significantly. Mean vowel formant measurements confirmed that the six phonological vowels form six distinct acoustic groupings; trajectories show slightly more formant movement in some vowels than was previously known. Adjacent nasal consonants exerted significant effects on vowel formant measurements. The authors show that an uncontrolled, general documentation corpus for an under-described language can be mined for acoustic analysis, but coarticulation effects should be taken into account.
本研究对巴布亚新几内亚东北部巴布亚语农贡语（Nungon ⟨yuw⟩）托韦特方言中的六个元音/i e a u o ɔ/进行了全面的声学描述与分析。元音样本取自为通用语言记录和语法描述而创建的音频语音记录语料库。为评估所宣称的音系元音长度差异的语音相关特征，对元音时长进行了测量。多点声学分析能够研究元音的平均F1、F2和F3；元音轨迹以及协同发音效应。农贡语的三个后元音尤其令人关注，因为它们构成了一个不对称的、后元音占主导的音列，并且/o/此前被描述为具有特别低的F2。作者发现，音系上长元音和短元音的时长存在显著差异。元音共振峰的平均测量结果证实，这六个音系元音形成了六个不同的声学分组；轨迹显示，某些元音中的共振峰移动比之前所知的略多。相邻的鼻辅音对元音共振峰测量产生了显著影响。作者表明，对于一种描述不足的语言，一个未经控制的通用记录语料库可用于声学分析，但应考虑协同发音效应。
