Acoustic properties of singleton and geminate ejective stops in Tsova-Tush

Abstract

Tsova-Tush, also known as Batsbi, is an underdescribed Northeast Caucasian language spoken by a few hundred people in Zemo Alvani, Georgia. The Tsova-Tush phoneme inventory includes four geminate stops that contrast with singletons at the same place of articulation: /tʰː t'ː qʰː q'ː/. The existence of geminate ejective stops is particularly interesting, as such phonemes are cross-linguistically rare, having been reported in only 13 of the 2,155 phoneme inventories sampled by PHOIBLE (http://phoible.org/). The present study characterizes these stops in Tsova-Tush based on high-quality audio recordings of four Tsova-Tush speakers producing a list of 65 target words in a carrier sentence. The following measures were statistically compared: closure duration, VOT, duration of the preceding vowel, and f 0 and H1*-H2* in the following vowel. Preliminary results from three speakers suggest that ejectives are characterized by shorter VOT, a shorter preceding vowel, and a difference in both f 0 and H1*-H2* in the following vowel, with marked interspeaker variation in the latter measures. This study provides the first detailed description of this typologically interesting two-by-two contrast (singleton aspirates, geminate aspirates, singleton ejectives, geminate ejectives) at two places of articulation (dental and uvular) in an underdescribed language.