Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in citation forms carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description both the vowel from recordings read speech. We confirm several features language, including presence nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized through coarticulation with coda [?]), certain contours, systematic breathy creaky voice on two tones. also find little evidence additional intonational f0 targets. However, show some vary greatly by position utterance, propose novel descriptions them. Finally, $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2 * , widely used measure quality phonation across does not adequately distinguish modal non-modal data set, argue noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) more robust to differences corpora variability.