Acoustic characteristics and perception of voiced and voiceless nasals in Mizo and Angami

Abstract

This study compares and contrasts acoustic characteristics (e.g., nasal murmur’s formant and anti-formant frequencies, vowel formant frequencies, bandwidths, spectral tilts, etc.) of voiced and voiceless nasals in Mizo and Angami, Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in North-East India. Mizo contrasts voiced and voiceless nasals at the bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation, whereas Angami contrasts them at four different places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, velar, and palatal. Similar to voiceless nasals previously described for Burmese (Danstuji,1984; Bhaskararao & Ladefoged,1991), in Mizo, voiceless nasal murmur is followed by a period of voiced nasal murmur as it transitions into the following vowel, while it remains voiceless throughout in Angami. Results of a perception experiment also suggests that the voiced nasal murmur portion in Mizo voiceless nasals aided the identification of its place of articulation, but a heavier perceptual load is placed on the following vowel for place id...