A Phonetic Basis for the Sonority of [χ]
Sarah Bakst and Jonah Katz
Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Question
• What is special about voiceless fricatives
that allows them a privileged, “high
sonority” phonotactic position in
language?
• Are phonotactics governed by perceptual
properties of sequences?
Hypothesis
• Speakers can use coartculatory cues to
recover informaton about a preceding
stop better before [χ] than before other
fricatives (e.g. [f]).
• The long front cavity in front of the [χ]
constricton yields a clearer formant
structure (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Formant structure in [f] (left) compared with [χ] (right).
Clearer formant structure means more recoverable co-artculatory
informaton about a preceding stop.
Figure 3: Scatterplot matrices showing sensitivity by listener and
context for native English speakers (left) and nonnative (right).
Experiment
Results
Is the sonority of χ the result of abstract or
perceptual properties?
• Speakers have low but signiﬁcant sensitivity to burst presence before
[f] but not [χ]
• Native English speakers are signiﬁcantly more sensitive to the
presence of a burst before [f] than before [χ].
• Non-native speakers show a diﬀerent behavior and may be attending
to diﬀerent cues.
Method:
• AX burst- detection task
• 500 ms ISI
• 420 trials
• 19 native English participants (18 female)
Stimuli:
Discussion and Conclusions
• Recorded by natve French speaker
• Syllables of shape tCV, where F = {f, χ, l}, V
= {a, e, I, o, u}
• Each syllable gave two stimuli: one left
intact, the other had the t-burst removed
(Fig. 2)
Figure 2: Example of a stimulus. For the burstless tokens, the ﬁrst 5 ms
were removed.
Selected References
Clements, G. N. 1990. The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabiﬁcation. In Papers in laboratory phonology I. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Fougeron, Cécile, and Donca Steriade. 1997. Does deletion of French schwa lead to neutralization of lexical distinctions? In Eurospeech, volume 2, 943–946.
Gordon, Matthew, Paul Barthmaier, and Kathy Sands. 2002. A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives. Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
Lindau, Mona. 1985. The story of /r/. In Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged., ed. Victoria A. Fromkin. Academic Press, Inc.
• Listeners are better able to infer presence of a stop despite the
absence of a burst before [χ] than before [f].
• A label like “rhoticity” is not required for explaining the phonotactics of
[χ] in French.
• These results make predictions for the phonotactics of other back
fricatives.
Parker, Stephen G. 2002. Quantifying the sonority hierarchy. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Wright, R. 2004. A review of perceptual cues and cue robustness. In D. Steriade, R. Kirchner, & B. Hayes
(Eds.), Phonetically based phonology (pp. 34–57). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yeou, M. and S. Maeda. Pharyngeal and uvular consonants are approximants: An acoustic modeling study. Proceedings of the 13th
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 1995.
Acknowledgments: Keith Johnson, UC Berkeley Phon Lab, Florian Lionnet, Desiree Chow, Meghan Sumner, Pat Keating, Susan Lin, Terry Regier, and fellow grad students. Research assistance provided by UC Berkeley Linguistics Research Apprenticeship Program.