Abstract
/h/ is described differently by different researchers. While some argue that /h/ is a glottal fricative, others argue that it is the voiceless counterpart of the following vowel, yet others argue that /h/ is a glide or an approximant. However, de- tailed acoustic studies focusing on /h/ are very limited. This study aims to describe the spectrographic characteristics of /h/ in Turkish. Test words consisted of 48 monosyllabic and disyllabic words containing /h/ which was followed by eight Turkish vowels. Totally 1440 tokens were analyzed. After segmentation, /h/ was classified based on its spectrographic characteristics: 1) segment exhibiting formants, 2) segment exhibiting frication (but no formants) with energy in lower frequencies and 3) segment exhibiting almost no energy. In order to find out if there is a significant difference among these three categories, Chi-square test was applied. The spectrographic characteristics of /h/ in Turkish suggest that it is more like the voiceless version of the surrounding vowels, significantly when it is in syllable initial position and the preceding vowel when in syllable final position.
Highlights
Most research on fricative sounds excludes /h/ /h/ is described as a voiceless glottal fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet [1]
As fricative sounds are produced with a narrow constriction in the oral cavity which results in a turbulent airflow, it follows that, as a glottal sound, /h/ would be produced with a turbulent airflow at the glottis or between the vocal folds
Fant [4] argues that /h/ has weak consonantal features but is not a vowel as it has less vowel-like qualities than neighboring vowels
Summary
Most research on fricative sounds excludes /h/ /h/ is described as a voiceless glottal fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet [1]. One reason for this exclusion is that /h/ does not show typical fricative spectrographic characteristics. Research has shown that the shape of the vocal tract for /h/ is the same as that for the neighboring sounds [2]. Fant [4] argues that /h/ has weak consonantal features but is not a vowel as it has less vowel-like qualities than neighboring vowels. Britton [5] concludes that /h/ is a voiceless glottal approximant in English as she argues that it is produced using the same organs as the following vowel
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