Contrast reduction among coronals is conditioned by the following vowel
نویسندگان
چکیده
There is evidence that coronal contrasts involving retroflexes are less clearly distinguished after a high front vowel /i/ [2, 9]. However, no detailed acoustic studies have been conducted to investigate whether following front vowels affect the contrastiveness of dentals, retroflexes and palatals. We examined the acoustic characteristics of three Punjabi coronal onsets /t̪ ʈ tʃ/ produced before five vowels /i e a u o/ by 12 Punjabi speakers. The results showed that only VOT and spectral variance of the release burst reliably distinguished Punjabi coronal stops in all vocalic contexts. Centre of gravity, skewness and kurtosis of release bursts did not differentiate the coronals in the /i/ context, but did distinguish them before /e a u o/. These findings shed more light on the phonetic basis of coronal contrasts in Indo-Aryan languages, and the ways that they interact with different following vowels.
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