Four -Way Stop Contrasts in Hindi: An Acoustic Study of Voicing, Fundamental Frequency and Spectral Tilt
Spectral intensity analysis of contrasting breathy and modal vowels in Gujarati, !Xoo and languages which make use of the breathy and modal phonation type as contrastive features provide a background against which spectral analysis of the breathy/murmured release following VAS can be conducted to test the assumptions of the standard view. Spectral analysis based on four measures of spectral intensity of the vowel following the stops indicate that the breathiness following the VAS permeates into a sizeable portion of the vowel. Comparisons between durations of breathiness spread and voiceless aspiration also show that voiceless aspiration is shorter in duration than the duration of breathiness characterized by the difference in spectral intensity between the VAS and the unaspirated stops (VS,VLS). Based on these analyses, I argue that the stop distinctions in Hindi are best understood as a cumulative effect of several acoustic cues, in contradistinction to previous accounts, including the standard view.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign