Conference Proceedings

Phonetically prestopped laterals in Australian Languages: A preliminary investigation of Warlpiri

Deborah Loakes, Andrew Butcher, Janet Fletcher, Hywel Stoakes

Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 incorporating SST 2008 | ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC | Published : 2008

Abstract

Phonologically prestopped nasals occur primarily in central and southern Australian languages. Phonetically prestopped nasals on the other hand, occur in a large number of Australian languages and are not isolated to one particular region. Phonetically prestopped nasals have been analysed as a preservation of spectral characteristics at vowel-sonorant boundaries in languages which have a comparatively large number of sonorant contrasts. In this paper we describe acoustic, articulatory and durational characteristics of rarely mentioned phonetically prestopped laterals, in the Australian language Warlpiri. We conclude that like prestopped nasals, prestopped laterals are likely to be the outcom..

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Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our language speaker, Bess Price Nungarrayi. This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to Janet Fletcher and Andrew Butcher.