VOT in Tibetan is conditioned by tone

Abstract

Several South Asian languages exhibit interactions among tone and consonant phonation, including Tamang (Mazoudon 2014) and Gurung (Ronkos 2015). In Central Tibetan, oral stops present a four-way contrast between two voicing/aspiration categories split across two lexical tones, high and low/rising. Across tones, previous analyses propose either a two-way contrast between unaspirated and aspirated stops (e.g., Dawson 1980), or a three-way contrast between voiced, unaspirated, and aspirated series (e.g., Denwood 1999), though acoustic measurements are lacking. This study recorded 19 native speakers of Tibetan in Kathmandu, Nepal, producing words exemplifying the phonological contrasts in stops and high/low tones. VOT measurements showed similar values for the unaspirated stops in both tonal environments, but a longer VOT in high-tone aspirated stops (46 ms) than low-tone aspirated stops (30 ms), or three different positive VOT values. That this three-way surface contrast cross-cuts tonal categories suggests an underlying two-way aspiration contrast. The apparent contrast between middle-VOT and long-VOT series results from the presence of a phonologically-specified high tone, which causes a lengthened VOT. This provides evidence for the conditioning of apparently-segmental characteristics by tone.Several South Asian languages exhibit interactions among tone and consonant phonation, including Tamang (Mazoudon 2014) and Gurung (Ronkos 2015). In Central Tibetan, oral stops present a four-way contrast between two voicing/aspiration categories split across two lexical tones, high and low/rising. Across tones, previous analyses propose either a two-way contrast between unaspirated and aspirated stops (e.g., Dawson 1980), or a three-way contrast between voiced, unaspirated, and aspirated series (e.g., Denwood 1999), though acoustic measurements are lacking. This study recorded 19 native speakers of Tibetan in Kathmandu, Nepal, producing words exemplifying the phonological contrasts in stops and high/low tones. VOT measurements showed similar values for the unaspirated stops in both tonal environments, but a longer VOT in high-tone aspirated stops (46 ms) than low-tone aspirated stops (30 ms), or three different positive VOT values. That this three-way surface contrast cross-cuts tonal categories suggests...