Contrastive breathiness on consonants and vowels.

Abstract

While numerous languages exhibit contrastive breathy phonation either on consonants (e.g., Indic languages) or on vowels (e.g., Zapotec languages); very few languages preserve this contrast across both consonants and vowels. Two such languages are Gujarati and White Hmong. Given that breathiness on consonants is typically realized as a breathy-voiced release into the following vowel, how are the two types of breathiness distinguished in CV sequences, if at all? We examine acoustic and electroglottographic data collected from speakers of Gujarati and White Hmong to determine what properties reliably distinguish breathy and modal voice in potentially ambiguous CV sequences, and to explore the phonetic and phonological properties shared between these two genetically unrelated languages. Preliminary results from both languages are strikingly similar; modal vowels adjacent to breathy consonant releases strongly resemble phonemically breathy vowels, and only the exact timing and magnitude of the acoustic reflexes of breathiness phonetically distinguish the two sequences. Phonological evidence in the form of distributional constraints, however, can aid listeners of both languages in determining the source of breathiness: both languages prohibit the co-occurrence of breathy consonants and breathy vowels, and in White Hmong, tonal cues can also reveal the underlying phonation of an ambiguous CV sequence.