Uncovering the acoustic vowel space of a previously undescribed language: The vowels of Nambo
- This study presents the first acoustic description of the vowel space of a Papuan language—Nambo, spoken in southern Papua New Guinea—based on duration and first and second formant measurements from 19 adult male and female speakers across three age groups (young, middle-aged, senior). Phonemically, Nambo has six full vowels /i, e, æ, ɑ, o, u/ and a reduced vowel tentatively labeled /ə/. Unlike the full vowels, the quality of /ə/ showed great variation: seniors' and young females' realizations tended to be more open and retracted than those by young males, while middle-aged speakers' productions fell between these two variants.
| Author details: | Eri Kashima, Daniel WilliamsORCiD, T. Mark Ellison, Dineke Schokkin, Paola EscuderoORCiD |
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| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4954395 |
| ISSN: | 0001-4966 |
| ISSN: | 1520-8524 |
| Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27369181 |
| Title of parent work (English): | The journal of the Acoustical Society of America |
| Publisher: | American Institute of Physics |
| Place of publishing: | Melville |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2016 |
| Publication year: | 2016 |
| Release date: | 2020/03/22 |
| Volume: | 139 |
| Number of pages: | 5 |
| First page: | EL252 |
| Last Page: | EL256 |
| Funding institution: | Australian Research Council Laureate Project The Wellsprings of Language Diversity [FL130100111]; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language [CE140100041] |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Exzellenzbereich Kognitionswissenschaften |
