Context-dependent phonetic enhancement of a phonation contrast in San Pablo Macuiltianguis Zapotec

Abstract

This paper presents novel data from San Pablo Macuiltianguis Zapotec, a Sierra Juárez variety spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. This language is ‘laryngeally complex’ (Silverman, 1997), exhibiting both contrastive tone and contrastive phonation. We examine the acoustic properties of the modal and checked vowels in this language, showing that this contrast is variably produced with several different acoustic cues. We analyze the distribution of these cues as an instance of phonetic enhancement and further show that the prosodic position of a given vowel determines which of several enhancement patterns is used. We argue that extant theories of phonetic enhancement, while able to explain the patterns described here, fall short of predicting the distribution of enhancing cues. We therefore propose that future models of phonetic enhancement could be expanded to predict patterns in which more than one acoustic dimension is available for phonetic enhancement.