The quantity language Yakut (Sakha) has a binary distinction between short and long vowels. Disyllabic words with short and long vowels in one or both syllables were extracted from spontaneous speech of native Yakut speakers. In addition, a controlled production by a native speaker of disyllabic words with different short and long vowel combinations along with contrastive minimal pairs was recorded in a phonetics laboratory. Acoustic measurements of the vowels' fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity showed a significant consistent lengthening of phonologically long vowels compared to their short counterparts. However, in addition to evident durational differences between long and short quantities, fundamental frequency and intensity also showed effects of quantity. These results allow the interpretation that similarly to other non-tonal quantity languages like Finnish or Estonian, the Yakut vowel quantity opposition is not based exclusively on durational differences. The data furthermore revealed differences in F0 contours between spontaneous and read speech, providing some first indications of utterance-level prosody in Yakut.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
May 2016
May 10 2016
Phonetic correlates of phonological vowel quantity in Yakut read and spontaneous speech
Lena Vasilyeva;
Lena Vasilyeva
a)
Department of Linguistics,
University of Alberta
, 2-40 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E7, Canada
Search for other works by this author on:
Anja Arnhold;
Anja Arnhold
Department of Linguistics,
University of Alberta
, 2-40 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E7, Canada
Search for other works by this author on:
Juhani Järvikivi
Juhani Järvikivi
Department of Linguistics,
University of Alberta
, 2-40 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E7, Canada
Search for other works by this author on:
a)
Electronic mail: [email protected]
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139, 2541–2550 (2016)
Article history
Received:
October 01 2015
Accepted:
April 13 2016
Citation
Lena Vasilyeva, Anja Arnhold, Juhani Järvikivi; Phonetic correlates of phonological vowel quantity in Yakut read and spontaneous speech. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 May 2016; 139 (5): 2541–2550. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4948448
Download citation file:
Pay-Per-View Access
$40.00
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
Citing articles via
All we know about anechoic chambers
Michael Vorländer
A survey of sound source localization with deep learning methods
Pierre-Amaury Grumiaux, Srđan Kitić, et al.
Performance study of ray-based ocean acoustic tomography methods for estimating submesoscale variability in the upper ocean
Etienne Ollivier, Richard X. Touret, et al.