This research began out of two overlapping motives. First, we have been observing what have impressionistically been termed ‘whistling’ fricatives in Shona (and also, though not reported here, in another language, Jibbali); we felt that there was room for a fuller analysis of some aspects of their production characteristics. Second, sibilance in general offers plenty of scope for what Delattre called the ‘quest of the Holy Grail’ in phonetics: the search for features of relevance to perception. More background to both the production and the perception issues will be given as we proceed.
In addition to the commonly found [s,z] and [∫ȝ], the Shona language has a third pair of sibilants [s,zw w] usually described as labialized alveolar fricatives and sometimes called “whistling” fricatives. Analysis of all these sibilants revealed that the location of the main frequency peak was typically 3 Bark higher for [s,z] than for the remaining four fricatives which did not differ significantly in this respect. Durational differences were slight throughout, and seemed unlikely to contribute as place cues. A likelier possibility for cueing the place distinction, we hypothesized, was an interaction of peak location with the gradient of the high- and low-frequency slopes adjacent to the peak, together perhaps with contributions from the VCV transitions. Experimental manipulation of these variables in synthetic versions of the three voiceless sibilants yielded listener identifications suggesting that (1) a flat HF slope cued [s] overridingly, irrespective of the peak location, but (2) peak location became important when a falling HF slope is used; and (3) a steep LF slope failed to create enough of a “whistling” percept as to outweigh transitional cues to the [∫]−[sw] distinction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.