Acoustic analysis on geminate consonants

in Guinaang Bontok

Katsura Aoyama

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

This paper reports acoustic analyses of single (short) and geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok.  In Guinaang Bontok, all consonants (stops, fricatives, nasals, liquids and glides) can appear as short and long, which is not very common among the world’s languages.  First, contrasts between short and long consonants are not as common as contrasts between short and long vowels (Ladefoged 1993), and second, not all consonants can appear as geminates even in the languages that have length contrasts.  For instance, stops, nasals, fricatives and liquids can appear as both short and long in Finnish, but glides cannot.  This study investigated whether the uncommon length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides, were less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop consonants.

METHOD. The participants were 4 native speakers of Guinaang Bontok (2 males, 2 females).  They were all residents of the Guinaang village in the Philippines.  Their ages varied from 15 to mid 50s.  The data collection was done in a house of one of the participants in the village, using a cassette tape recorder with a microphone.

The words were orthographically presented to the participants one by one.  A frame sentence was also presented with the words.  The participants were asked to say each word in isolation first, and then to repeat the word in the frame sentence twice.  Thus three tokens (one in isolation and two in the frame sentence) were collected for each target word from each participant.  A total of 32 words were acoustically analyzed for each participant.

Sixteen words included single consonants and the other sixteen words included geminate consonants (see page 2 for the word list).  The target consonant always appeared intervocalically.  The recordings were digitized at 22.05 Hz, and the data were analyzed acoustically using the program Pitchworks.  Wide-band spectrograms were produced for each target word and the durations of single and geminate nasals were measured in milliseconds.  A total of 384 tokens (32 words x 3 repetitions x 4 participants) was analyzed.

RESULTS.  Table 1 summarizes the results.  The average durations of geminate consonants were clearly longer than those of single consonants in all consonants.  The ratios between single and geminate consonants showed that geminate stops, nasals and liquids were twice as long as their short counterparts on average, whereas geminate glides were only 55% longer than their short counterparts on average.  The average duration of short glides were 90 ms., which was about 10 ms. longer than short nasals and liquids on average (78 and 79 ms. respectively), and geminate glides were the shortest (139ms.) compared to other kinds of consonants.

It seems that the phonetic properties of contrasts between single and geminate contrasts in Guinaang Bontok match with the crosslinguistic tendency; the results suggest that the durational contrasts are larger in more commonly found length contrasts (stops, nasals and liquids) than less commonly found contrasts (glides) in a language which has contrasts in all of them. 

Ladefoged, P. (1993). A course in phonetics. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Table 1: The average duration of each kind of consonants in milliseconds

Note: Each average duration is based on 48 tokens (4 words x 3 repetitions x 4 speakers). 

Word list:

stops

ípit                    ‘to squeeze’                       ippit                  a nonsense word

kóput               a nonsense word            koppot            a kind of mushroom

            kákak               a kind of bird              kakkak            to clack

            ókip                 to pack                         okkip               a nonsense word

nasals

            ama                  father                            amma               to do something gently

            anak                 child                             an-annak   children

            ina                    mother                          inna                  a nonsense word

            tonga                a nonsense word            tongnga            an ear of corn

liquids

            ílang                 a portion of fresh meat

            illang                 name of a place

            alíng                 a nonsense word            alling            ‘earring’

            árang                rice granary             arrang  

            arók                 to urge                          arrok                a simple-minded person

glides

            kháwa              center               khawwa          middle finger

            cháya               sky                   chayya              a name

            cháyon             swing                chayyong         a kind of rice

            káyang             to play with water

            kayyang          a kind of wine jar

Frame sentences:

(1) Si (the target word) nan inayákhana.

“____ is the one he called.” (For made-up names.)

(2) Apedna kinwániyen (the target word).

“He just said ___.”              (For all the other test words.)