Preaspiration and the Voicing Contrast in Lule Sami

• Published in: Phonetica
• Main Author: Engstrand, Olle
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Walter de Gruyter GmbH 1987
• Subjects: Linguistics and Language; Acoustics and Ultrasonics; Language and Linguistics; sami
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000261784; https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1159/000261784/xml; https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1159/000261784/pdf

Abstract This experiment investigates the role of voice offset time (the durational aspect of preaspiration), closure duration and voice onset time as phonetic carriers of the voiced-voiceless contrast in Lule Sami word-medial stop consonants. Spectrographic measurements were made on speech samples produced by 7 subjects. The subjects belong to two roughly homogeneous dialect groups. For one of the groups, voice offset time provides a reliable phonetic expression of the voicing feature; for the other group, this relationship is less clear-cut. When observed across subjects, stop closure duration is not consistently related to the voiced-voiceless contrast. Finally, the voice onset time parameter is irrelevant to the contrast.