The coordination of glottal with oral articulations in Icelandic and Hindi

Abstract

In most consonants produced with glottal abduction, the opening is largely or entirely contained within the accompanying oral articulation. Furthermore, the peak glottal opening occurs at a constant interval from the beginning of the oral articulation in unaspirated stops and voiceless fricatives and at a constant interval from the release in aspirated stops, indicating tight coordination with the oral articulation [A. Lofqvist and H. Yoshioka, “Interarticulator programming in obstruent production,” Phonetica 38, 21–34 (1981)]. Icelandic and Hindi possess stops in which the glottal opening takes place largely outside the oral closure; in Icelandic preaspirated stops, abduction precedes the closure and in Hindi breathy voiced stops, abduction follows the closure. Both languages also have (post) aspirated stops with which the stops of interest can be compared. This study examined whether external glottal articulations are also tightly coordinated with the oral articulation of the consonant. One female speaker of each language has been recorded so far, producing words containing the stops of interest at different rates and with stress either on the syllable containing the stop or not. If the oral and glottal articulations are coordinated with one another, then changes in their individual durations due to changes in rate or stress location should covary. The duration of both pre‐ and post‐aspiration in Icelandic covaried with the duration of the adjacent vowel, and the duration of preaspiration also covaried with the following stop closure, but the duration of postaspiration did not covary with the preceding stop closure. In Hindi, the duration of both breathy voice and (post) aspiration coratied with the duration of the preceding stop closure but the duration of neither covaried with that of the following vowel. Both kinds of Hindi stops are like those observed in other languages, but the relative timing of glottal and oral articulations in the Icelandic stops is dearly different. In that language, the oral articulation with which the glottal articulation is coordinated is the vowel or the vowel and consonant combined.