Acoustic, phonetic, and phonological features of Drehu vowels

Abstract

This study presents an acoustic investigation of the vowel inventory of Drehu (Southern Oceanic Linkage), spoken in New Caledonia. Reportedly, Drehu has a 14 vowel system distinguishing seven vowel qualities and an additional length distinction. Previous phonological descriptions were based on impressionistic accounts showing divergent proposals for two out of seven reported vowel qualities. This study presents the first phonetic investigation of Drehu vowels based on acoustic data from eight speakers. To examine the phonetic correlates of the proposed phonological vowel inventory, multi-point acoustic analyses were used, and vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) was investigated (F1, F2, and F3). Additionally, vowel duration was measured. Contrary to reports from other studies on VISC in monophthongs, we find that monophthongs in Drehu are mostly steady state. We propose a revised vowel inventory and focus on the acoustic description of open-mid /ɛ/ and the central vowel /ə/, whose status was previously unclear. Additionally, we find that vowel quality stands orthogonal to vowel quantity by demonstrating that the phonological vowel length distinction is primarily based on a duration cue rather than formant structure. Finally, we report the acoustic properties of the seven vowel qualities that were identified.

Acoustic Analyses of L1 and L2 Vowel Interactions in Mandarin–Cantonese Late Bilinguals

“…N is the normalised formant value of the N th formant for the vowel V, F n[V] stands for the original formant values that are measured in Hz, and MEAN n and S n are the mean and standard deviation (SD) of the N th formant of the target speaker, respectively. To make the F1 and F2 values comparable to the findings in previous studies [23,29], the normalised formant values were then rescaled to Hz following [30] with Equations ( 2) and (3) below:…”