Extreme stop allophony in Mixtec spontaneous speech: Data, word prosody, and modelling

Word-level prosody plays an important role in processes of consonant lenition. Typically, consonants word-initial position are strengthened while those word-medial lenited (Keating, Cho, Fougeron, & Hsu, 2003). In this paper we examine the relationship between word-prosodic and obstruent lenition a spontaneous speech corpus Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, endangered Mixtecan language spoken Mexico. The exhibits surprising amount realization otherwise voiceless unaspirated stops fricatives careful speech. Experiment 1, relationships word position, duration, passive voicing find that pre-tonic is locus both lengthening less voicing. Non-pre-tonic produced with more shorter duration. We also functional status morpheme 2, manner similar pattern – often realized complete closure relative to non-pre-tonic stops, which incomplete closure. 3, model these patterns using series deep neural networks that, even limited training data, can achieve reasonably high accuracy automatic categorization patterns. results research complement recent work on phonetics world’s languages (Katz Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020) provide computational tools for modeling predicting extreme