Acoustic features of upper necaxa totonac ejective fricatives

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic properties of a class of sounds known as ejective fricatives in Upper Necaxa Totonac (UNT), a Totonac-Tepehua language of northern Puebla, Mexico, and to relate these sounds to those in other languages. Ejective fricatives are an exceedingly rare class of sounds found in only a relatively small number of the world's languages. This study attempts to clarify the nature of the acoustic signal of these sounds in UNT, whose historical origins have been reconstructed as former fricative plus glottal stop clusters [Beck, 2006, Univ. of Alberta Working Papers, 1], use the acoustic data to verify whether these segments are in fact canonical ejectives and propose future directions for further research. Analyses of the segments in question include duration and center of gravity of the fricative portions, presence or absence of any periods of silence surrounding the segments, durations of such silences, and effects on pitch, amplitude, duration, and formants of neighboring vowels. Due to the variable nature of the realization of laryngeal phonemes in UNT, pitch, amplitude, and voice quality of both preceding and following vowels were analyzed as well.