Volume 79, Issue 2

This paper focuses on the question of the representation of nasality as well as speakers’ awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels (CṼC) and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant (CVN). A series of three cross-modal forced-choice experiments was used to investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is stored and that this sparse representation governs how listeners interpret vowel nasality. Visual full-word targets were preceded by auditory primes consisting of CV segments of CVC words with nasal vowels ([tʃɑ̃] for [tʃɑ̃d] ‘moon’), oral vowels ([tʃɑ] for [tʃɑl] ‘unboiled rice’) or nasalised oral vowels ([tʃɑ̃(n)] for [tʃɑ̃n] ‘bath’) and reaction times and errors were measured. Some targets fully matched the prime while some matched surface or underlying representation only. Faster reaction times and fewer errors were observed after CṼC primes compared to both CVC and CVN primes. Furthermore, any surface nasality was most frequently matched to a CṼC target unless no such target was available. Both reaction times and error data indicate that nasal vowels are specified for nasality leading to faster recognition compared to underspecified oral vowels, which cannot be perfectly matched with incoming signals.

Northern and Southern Raglai are two closely related Austronesian dialects (Chamic branch) spoken in south-central Vietnam. Although they are mutually intelligible, Northern Raglai is described as having a voicing contrast in onset stops, while Southern Raglai is assumed to have replaced the Chamic voicing contrast with a register contrast realized on the whole syllable (but primarily on its vowel). A production study of the two dialects confirms that Northern Raglai preserves a voicing contrast, even if most women exhibit partial devoicing of their voiced stops, and that Southern Raglai has developed a register contrast based on F1 and phonation cues at the beginning of vowels. The weights of the acoustic properties of voicing and register are similar across ages and genders, suggesting that the two laryngeal contrasts are phonetically stable. Even if there is little evidence of change in progress, a close inspection of the Northern Raglai voicing contrast reveals voicing-conditioned modulations of F1 and perturbations of phonation after partially devoiced stops that could be precursors of a register system similar to that of Southern Raglai. We argue that this is a pathway to registrogenesis and speculate about the articulatory laryngeal mechanisms that could trigger registrogenetic changes. Our data also show that the Northern Raglai voicing contrast is unstable in aspirated stops and that voiced aspirated stops typically have a partially voiceless and partially voiced aspiration.

Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) — the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0 , and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis.