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Abstract
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language which contrasts a rich set of coronal stops at dental and retroflex places of articulation across three laryngeal configurations. Moreover, all these stops occur contrastively in various positions (word-initially, -medially, and -finally). The goal of this study is to investigate how various coronal place and laryngeal contrasts are distinguished acoustically both within and across word positions. A number of temporal and spectral correlates were examined in data from 13 speakers of Eastern Punjabi: Voice Onset Time, release and closure durations, fundamental frequency, F1-F3 formants, spectral center of gravity and standard deviation, H1*-H2*, and cepstral peak prominence. The findings indicated that higher formants and spectral measures were most important for the classification of place contrasts across word positions, whereas laryngeal contrasts were reliably distinguished by durational and voice quality measures. Word-medially and -finally, F2 and F3 of the preceding vowels played a key role in distinguishing the dental and retroflex stops, while spectral noise measures were more important word-initially. The findings of this study contribute to a better understanding of factors involved in the maintenance of typologically rare and phonetically complex sets of place and laryngeal contrasts in the coronal stops of Indo-Aryan languages.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Kiranpreet Nara for assistance in the design of the materials, recruitment of participants, and data collection. Thanks to Maida Percival for help with data collection, to Chahla Ben-Ammar for data segmentation, and to James Kirby for answering our questions related to PraatSauce.
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Research funding: This project was funded by a Faculty of Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Award to QH and an Insight Grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#435-2015-2013) to AK.
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Author contributions: QH: Investigation, Methodology, Data Analysis and Visualization, and Writing – original draft. AK: Investigation, Methodology, and Writing – reviewing and editing.
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Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare.
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Ethics statement: The experimental protocol of this study was approved by the University of Toronto Office of Research Ethics (Protocol Number 31791). Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
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