A phonetic study of Nanai vowels: Using automated post-transcriptional processing techniques

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable growth in Altaic field linguistics, with recognizable achievements especially in language description and archiving. However, relatively less effort has been made to analyze the collected materials from the general phonetic perspectives. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how the archived language data can be analyzed using automated tools for speech annotation and phonetic analysis and thus with drastically reduced time and effort. Using the published IPA-based transcriptions of the lexical items (Ko & Yurn 2011), we ran Prosodylabaligner (Gorman et al. 2011) for the automatic segmentation and labelling of the Nanai recordings collected by the Altaic Society of Korea. After this post-processing, the acoustic characteristics of vowels were automatically measured using scripts written for Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2014). The acoustic analysis of Nanai vowels shows that, by and large, the automated process produces relatively reliable results with its effectiveness evidenced in terms of time and effort. We believe that Altaic linguistics will be highly benefited from these practical techniques with the improvement of accuracy.