Implosives in Jakarta Indonesian

Abstract

Some Jakarta Indonesian speakers produce implosives as allophones of the voiced stops /b/ and /d/. Implosives are typically characterized by increasing voicing amplitude during closure, shorter closure duration and/or creaky phonation of the following vowel, but their actual realization shows much variation across languages (see Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996; Lindau 1984). This study investigates the acoustic properties of Indonesian implosives. Thirty-three native speakers of Jakarta Indonesian were recorded. Each speaker produced one hundred words with initial /b/, /d/ or /p/ in different vowel contexts (e.g. /baik/, /biru/) embedded in carrier phrases. A trained phonetician judged whether each case of /b/ and /d/ in their speech was imploded or not. I measured the voicing amplitude and duration of each target stop and the creakiness of the following vowel by means of harmonic amplitude differences such as H1-H2 (Keating et al. 2010). A preliminary analysis reveals that stops judged as implosives generally had more increasing voicing amplitude than those judged as modal plosives. The former also had a shorter duration and their following vowels had relatively low H1-H2 and H1-A2 values, which indicates creakier phonation. The analysis also shows that implosivization is more likely to occur before a non-high back vowel.