Abstract
AbstractThe paper reports the results of an analysis of acoustic correlates to phonological contrasts in vowel length, quality and pharyngeal width with data from five native speakers of the Khalkh dialect. The study replicates Svantesson’s (1985) discovery of a chain-shift rotation of the round vowels in their presumed evolution from Classical Mongolian. Analysis with VoiceSauce (Shue et al. in: Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII, 1846–1849, 2009) finds that in addition to the first formant, the harmonics-to-noise ratio is a reliable indicator of the ATR versus RTR contrast that has been hypothesized to be the basis of the language’s vowel harmony.
Funder
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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