Coarticulatory fundamental frequency effects associated with Ju/hoansi guttural consonants

Abstract

This study presents the results of an investigation of the fundamental frequency of vowels following guttural clicks in Ju/hoansi. Ju/hoansi contains an extremely rich set of consonantal phonation types that behave as gutturals, having contrastive aspirated, uvularized, epiglottalized, and glottalized clicks. Additionally, closure voicing is contrastive for oral aspirated, nasal aspirated, uvularized, and epiglottalized consonants, making the language a good test case for the effect of voicing on fundamental frequency of the following vowel. Fundamental frequency traces were created from the inverse of glottal period durations, which were calculated between adjacent Epoch marks (point of maximum glottal closure) determined by the ESPS Epochs utility associated with XWAVES. This methodology avoided pitch halving and doubling that is often found following nonmodal consonant phonation types. Previous studies have shown lower F0 following voiced unaspirated and voiced aspirated consonants, which have led to the expectation that voicing is associated with lowering of fundamental frequency. The results here show that voicing only lowers fundamental frequency when the release phase of a consonant is voiced as is the case for the voiced aspirated clicks, and not when there is only closure voicing, as is found in the case of the voiced epiglottalized clicks.