Glottalized Stops

There has been a recent increase in speech research utilizing data recorded with participants' personal devices, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on face-toface interactions. This raises important questions about whether these recordings are comparable to those made in traditional lab-based settings. Some previous studies have compared the viability of recordings made with personal devices for the clinical evaluation of voice quality. However, these studies rely on simple statistical analyses and do not examine acoustic correlates of voice quality typically examined in the (socio-) phonetic literature (e.g. H1-H2). In this study, we compare recordings from a set of smartphones/laptops and a solid-state recorder to assess the reliability of a range of acoustic correlates of voice quality. The results show significant differences for many acoustic measures of voice quality across devices. Further exploratory analyses demonstrate that these differences are not simple offsets, but rather that their magnitude depends on the value of the measurement of interest. We therefore urge researchers to exercise caution when examining voice quality based on recordings made with participants' devices, particularly when interested in small effect sizes. We also call on the speech research community to investigate these issues more thoroughly.

This paper presents the results of two tasks of perception of Kaqchikel stop consonants performed by two groups of multilingual learners of Kaqchikel. All learners spoke both Spanish and English but were differentiated based on which of those two was their first language.

Kaqchikel is a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala by approximately 400,000 people (Heaton & Xoyón, 2016). Like all Mayan languages, a primary distinction among its eight (8) stop consonants is one of glottalization (Bennett, 2016). At each of four places of articulation there are two stop phonemes: one glottalized (ejective or implosive) and one unglottalized (plain) phoneme.

Modelled after Wagner & Baker-Smemoe (2013), the first perception task was an AX discrimination task in which learners indicated whether pairs of Kaqchikel words were two pronunciations of the same word or two pronunciations of different words. The target difference among these words being between two of the eight stop phonemes of Kaqchikel. The second perception task was a categorization task wherein participants heard Kaqchikel words and categorized them based on what they thought their initial (first testing block) or final (second block) sound was, choosing from among Kaqchikel’s eight stop phonemes.

The L1 English learners were better at correctly discriminating Kaqchikel stop consonants than L1 Spanish learners, but only regarding Place of Articulation. This is surprising, as Spanish and English do not differ in their stops’ place features, both having three places of articulation while lacking Kaqchikel’s Uvular place. The groups did not differ in their detection of glottalization differences. In the second task, L1 English learners were more consistent than L1 Spanish learners in categorization of seven of the eight Kaqchikel phoneme categories. Taken together: despite all learners’ fluency in both Spanish and English, L1 English learners are better than L1 Spanish learners at distinguishing Kaqchikel stop consonants.

In this article, I show that the spirantization part of Grimm's law and Verner's law (intervocalic voicing) were part of a single, hence synchronous, process. The reasoning goes in two steps: (i) with the adoption of the Glottalic Theory it becomes clear that both laws are in an Elsewhere relationship, and (ii) an analysis in OT terms reveals that the laws are related. Looking at the revised PIE obstruent inventory I conclude that deglottalization of the original ejectives is the trigger of the now combined laws.

for valuable discussions and suggestions. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. Remaining errors are mine. The analysis presented in this paper was presented in various stages of development to audiences in Amsterdam, Lille, Nantes, Orléans, Gniezno and Manchester. 1 "Man mag die lautverschiebung passend wagen vergleichen, die in einem kreise umlaufen: sobald ein rad die stelle des vorangehenden erreicht ist seine eigne bereits von einem folgenden eingenommen, aber keins ereilt das andere, bei ihrer bewegung kann nirgend raum bleiben, der nicht alsbald ausgefüllt würde."

In American English, the presence of creaky voice can derive from distinct linguistic processes, including phrasal creak (prolonged irregular voicing, often at edges of prosodic phrases) and coda /t/ glottalization (when the alveolar closure for syllable-final /t/ is replaced by or produced simultaneously with glottal constriction). Previous work has shown that listeners can differentiate words in phrasal creak from those with /t/ glottalization, which suggests that there are acoustic differences between the creaky voice derived from phrasal creak and /t/ glottalization. In this study, we analyzed vowels preceding syllable-final /t/ in the Buckeye Corpus, which includes audio recordings of spontaneous speech from 40 speakers of American English. Tokens were coded for presence of phrasal creak (prolonged irregular voicing extending beyond the target syllable) and /t/ glottaliza-tion (whether the /t/ was produced only with glottal constriction). Eleven spectral measures of voice quality, including both harmonic and noise measures, were extracted automatically and discriminant analyses were performed. The results indicate that the discriminant functions can classify these sources of creaky voice above chance, and that Cepstral Peak Prominence, a measure of harmonics-to-noise ratio, is important for distinguishing phrasal creak from glottalization.

This paper is meant to reexamine the relative (and, at some points, absolute) chronology of some Early Greek changes of the occlusive phonemes (i.e. devoicing of Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates , assibilation and palatalizations) and to point out some apparent questions and problems concerning the occlusive system as a whole.

The phonological behavior of ejectives and implosives as well as their relation with other glottalic sounds pose a number of serious problems to current phonological theories. This paper reveals some of these deficiencies and presents an alternative representation of these segments based on the notion of phonological complexity, as proposed in Sagey (1986) and tentatively applied to glottalized sounds in McCarthy (1989).

Oromo, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia and Kenya, is a language characterized by particularly complex morphophonology. It provides extremely interesting data for linguistic research on the nature of long vowels and geminate consonants, because long sequences are very common and have a high functional load. The focus of this study is to provide a systematic description and analysis of long sequences, with particular reference to the grammatical functioning of the length parameter. The findings prove that there is a length morphological unit that is phonologically interpreted as a copying process, it can also be asserted that the language treats vowel and consonant length in a systematic way. The analysis supports the autosegmental interpretation of long segments as single units in the quality tier and as two units in the quantity tier. However, some data contradict the universal and obligatory nature of this representation in identical segments belonging to different morphemes, because distinctions between many-to-one and one-to-one associations are necessary to account for the facts of particular languages. This dissertation works within the theory of phonological weight, because it permits the autosegmental expression of significant differences between the segments according to their initial and final quantity as well as to the way in which the quality tier associates with the quantity tier.

An important testing ground for the extent of and need for a relationship between phonological features and phonetic reality is to be found in the long-standing problem of the description of aspiration in Sanskrit. Sanskrit has two types of consonants with what is traditionally referred to as "aspiration", the so-called voiceless aspirated stops, ph th th ch kh (hereafter Th), and the so-called voiced aspirated stops, bh dh dh jh gh (hereafter Dh). Each of these stops stands in opposition to an unaspirated stop of like voicing at the same point of articulation, this giving a four-way opposition in the stops, e.g. b : bh : ph : p. Assuming that this traditional terminology has some basis in phonetic fact, this opposition between ostensibly aspirated and unaspirated elements would, at first glance, suggest the need to treat aspiration as a unified phenomenon at the phonological level, parallel to its apparent phonetic unity.

Grassmann's Law in Greek and Sanskrit can be seen as part of a combination of rules and underlying morpheme structure constraints whose effect is to eliminate in large measure surface phonetic structures containing more than one aspirated stop per word. Targets of this kind are characterized by the reduction of a complex phonological system to a simpler, less marked system (Haiman 1972). In both Greek and Sanskrit, the de-aspiration 'conspiracy' brings about a situation in which only one segment position (or cluster) per word potentially displays the maximum number of contrasts available in the stop system (t,th,d, dh in Sanskrit, t, th, d in Greek); in other positions, the stop system is reduced to the more basic contrast t/d. Grassmann's Law is thus seen as a rule which, while itself unnatural, results in unmarked surface structures. In this paper it is argued that de-aspiration in Greek and Sanskrit continues a Proto-Indo-European system of constraints whose goal is a surface phonological pattern containing only the contrast voiced/voiceless in stop positions other than one. The PIE stop system assumed is (with the traditional equivalent in brackets): t (t), d (dh), t'(d), the third member being an ejective (Hopper 1973). A constraint in the proto-language prevented the occurrence of two ejective stops in the same root; consequently only one segment position could attain the maximum number of contrasts. In other positions, the contrast was between voiced and voiceless (t/d). Since the ejectives did not figure in PIE suffixes, no sandhi rule could produce two ejectives in the same word, and it may therefore be assumed that this constraint also existed in surface structure. When in Greek and Sanskrit the ejectives became voiced stops, the aspirated stops became the most highly marked members of the obstruent system and the other two sets of stops stood in an unmarked opposition voiced/voiceless. The restriction of Grassmann's Law to Sanskrit and Greek is thus diachronically motivated: these are the only two languages which both retained a multiple manner contrast in stops and changed ejectives into voiced stops. (John Haiman, 1972. "Phonological targets and unmarked structures." Language 48,2:365-377; Paul Hopper, 1973, "Glottalized and murmured occlusives in Indo-European." Glossa 7.2:1-32.)

Indo-Europeanists have traditionally reconstructed for ProtoIndo-European (PIE) a system of stops consisting of two voiced members (Idl and ldhl) and either one or two voiceless (Itl or Itl and Ithl). For those who posit a three-stop system ItI, Idl, and ldhl, the problem of typological improbability presents itself, for a typologically plausible triple stop system should have only one voiced stop. In this paper, two main points are made: (1) the voiced aspirates should be regarded as partially voiced (murmured) rather than as aspirated or tense, and (2) the supposed 'plain voiced' stops (Idl, etc.) show many of the typological characteristics of glottalized stops (ejectives), e.g. they are excluded from inflectional affixes, they may not co-occur with one another in the same root, etc. Combining these two observations, we may

In this article, I show that the spirantization part of Grimm's law and Verner's law (intervocalic voicing) were part of a single, hence synchronous, process. The reasoning goes in two steps: (i) with the adoption of the Glottalic Theory it becomes clear that both laws are in an Elsewhere relationship, and (ii) an analysis in OT terms reveals that the laws are related. Looking at the revised PIE obstruent inventory I conclude that deglottalization of the original ejectives is the trigger of the now combined laws.

for valuable discussions and suggestions. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. Remaining errors are mine. The analysis presented in this paper was presented in various stages of development to audiences in Amsterdam, Lille, Nantes, Orléans, Gniezno and Manchester. 1 "Man mag die lautverschiebung passend wagen vergleichen, die in einem kreise umlaufen: sobald ein rad die stelle des vorangehenden erreicht ist seine eigne bereits von einem folgenden eingenommen, aber keins ereilt das andere, bei ihrer bewegung kann nirgend raum bleiben, der nicht alsbald ausgefüllt würde." 2 "Der Vorgang war also folgender: als die Media aspirata sich der Media annäherte und mit ihr zusammenfallen drohte, bemühten sich die Sprechenden die Media von ihr zu differenzieren; die Realisation dieses Phonems führte dabei zur fortis-Artikulation. Sobald aber die Media dadurch der