Volume 80, Issue 6

The aim of this article is to check whether the phenomena that were indexicalised in flamenco singing during the early stages of the professionalisation of singing (seseo, fricatisation, aspiration and elision of sounds, rhotacism) have been preserved over the generations. Above all, we want to know whether these phenomena have survived in this period and in the new varieties of the genre, such as flamenco fusion. For this work we elaborated and transcribed two flamenco corpora from the analysis of 44 h of recordings and a total of 94,978 lemmas with phonetic phenomena. The results have shown that, indeed, in flamenco there are indexical phonetic phenomena that have been registered as representative marks of the cante. In fact, the cantaores themselves, regardless of their origin, use the same sounds. However, a decrease in the use of phonetic phenomena of the genre in New Flamenco has been observed, especially in the younger generations.

Voiceless sonorant consonants are typologically rare segments, appearing in only a few of the world’s languages, including Burmese. In this study, Burmese sonorants and their adjacent vowels are investigated in an attempt to (1) determine what acoustic correlates distinguish voiced and voiceless sonorants and (2) determine whether there are multiple realizations of voiceless sonorants and, if so, establish what acoustic correlates distinguish them. In order to pursue these questions, a production study was carried out and target words were analyzed, demonstrating that Burmese voiceless sonorants have a spread glottis period resulting in turbulent airflow 78 % of the time. Findings from linear mixed-effects models showed that voiced and voiceless sonorants are significantly different in terms of duration of the sonorant, F0 of the sonorant, and strength of excitation measured over the following vowel. A linear discriminant analysis was able to predict voicing category with 86.7 % accuracy, with the duration of the spread glottis period being the best indicator of voicelessness, followed by the cues that were significant in the linear mixed-effects models. In cases when the spread glottis period is absent from voiceless sonorants, the sonorant only has correlates that are associated with voicelessness (such as F0 and strength of excitation) but not correlates that are associated with the spread glottis gesture (such as duration and harmonics-to-noise ratio). These results have implications both for our understanding of the acoustics of Burmese sonorants and for our understanding of voiceless sonorants more generally.

John Ohala claimed that the source of sound change may lie in misperceptions which can be replicated in the laboratory. We tested this claim for a historical change of /t/ to /k/ in the coda in the Southern Min dialect of Chaoshan. We conducted a forced-choice segment identification task with CVC syllables in which the final C varied across the segments [p t k ʔ] in addition to a number of further variables, including the V, which ranged across [i u a]. The results from three groups of participants whose native languages have the coda systems /p t k ʔ/ (Zhangquan), /p k ʔ/ (Chaoshan) and /p t k/ (Dutch) indicate that [t] is the least stably perceived segment overall. It is particularly disfavoured when it follows [a], where there is a bias towards [k]. We argue that this finding supports a perceptual account of the historically documented scenario whereby a change from /at/ to /ak/ preceded and triggered a more general merger of /t/ with /k/ in the coda of Chaoshan. While we grant that perceptual sound changes are not the only or even the most common type of sound change, the fact that the perception results are essentially the same across the three language groups lends credibility to Ohala’s perceptually motivated sound changes.