Velar lateral allophony in Mee (Ekari)

Abstract

Velar lateral sounds are rare and their acoustics and contextual effects are understudied. Positional variants of velar laterals are also rarely reported. This paper documents a previously unknown allophony pattern of the velar lateral in Mee (Trans New Guinea; Indonesia), based on an elicitation study with two speakers and a controlled set of recordings from one of the speakers. Our main dataset included carrier phrase recordings of Mee words with the velar lateral, representing the diverse set of contexts where the velar lateral occurs. Our acoustic findings suggest that the Mee velar lateral is realized as a laterally released velar stop [ɡᶫ] before front vowels, and with uvular closure followed by a fricative release [ɢʁ] before back vowels. In line with this description, we found differences in the second formant of the preceding vowel and the periodicity of the release for the two allophones. We explore the implications of our findings for the typology of velar laterals.