Phonetic description of a three-way stop contrast in Northern Paiute

This paper presents the phonetic description of a three-way phonemic contrast in the medial stops (lenis, fortis, and voiced fortis stops) of a southern dialect of Northern Paiute. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of VOT, closure duration, and voice quality was performed on field recordings of a female speaker from the 1950s. The findings include that: 1) voiced fortis stops are realized phonetically as voiceless unaspirated stops; 2) the difference between fortis and voiced fortis and between voiced fortis and lenis in terms of VOT is subtle; 3) consonantal duration is a robust acoustic characteristic differentiating the three classes of stops; 4) lenis stops are characterized by a smooth VC transition, while fortis stops often exhibit aspiration at the VC juncture, and voiced fortis stops exhibit occasional glottalization at the VC juncture. These findings suggest that the three-way contrast is realized by combination of multiple phonetic properties, particularly the properties that occur at the vowel-consonant boundary rather than the consonantal release.