An acoustic study of Deg Xinag fricatives

Abstract

Few studies have looked at the acoustic properties of fricatives in Native American languages. Notable exceptions are McDonough (2003) on Navajo, and Gordon, Barthmaier, and Sands (2002), which examined a variety of languages, including several Native American ones. In Deg Xinag, an endangered Athabaskan language spoken in Alaska, there are eight places of articulation for voiceless fricatives [a relatively large phonetic inventory, according to Maddieson (1984)], including some rarely studied place contrasts (e.g. alveolar versus retroflex). In this study, pre- and post-vocalic fricatives were digitally recorded in the field from eight speakers (two males, six females) using a head-mounted mic to control for distance from the source. The segmental context was also controlled for, the neighboring vowel being [a] in all cases. Each speaker produced four repetitions of each word. The first four spectral moments, lowest spectral peak, and the three loudest spectral peaks were measured at the midpoint of each fricative, and each speaker’s average for each of the measures was calculated. In this poster, qualitative results in the form of spectrographic analysis will be presented. Repeated measures ANOVA for each of the quantitative measures will also be presented. [Work supported by NSF.]