Acoustic Realization and Inventory Size: Kannada and Malayalam Alveolar/Retroflex Laterals and /ɻ/

Abstract

This study examines formant and spectral moment data for the apical and retroflex lateral sounds /l ɭ/ of the Dravidian languages Kannada and Malayalam, together with the rhotic /ɻ/ of Malayalam. Data are presented for 10 male speakers of each language. We find that the first spectral moment is lower for retroflex laterals than for alveolar laterals, and lower for the rhotic /ɻ/ of Malayalam than for the retroflex lateral in the same language. Differences emerge when the retroflex lateral of Kannada is compared with the same sound in Malayalam. For both languages, F1 is higher and F3 and F4 are lower for the retroflex /ɭ/ than for the alveolar /l/. However, F2 is higher for the retroflex than for the alveolar sound in Kannada, but lower in Malayalam. This difference is also reflected in differences in the second spectral moment between the languages. It is suggested that since proximity of F2 and F3 is known to be a defining feature of the rhotic /ɻ/ in Malayalam, principles of phonetic dispersion apply to keep F2 from becoming too close to F3 for the retroflex lateral /ɭ/ of Malayalam, but not for the same sound in Kannada.

Retroflex and non-retroflex laterals in the Zibo dialect of Chinese

“…The lower F2 in /í/ is the opposite to the finding for F2 in Tamil. The duration of /í/ in Malayalam is also reported to be shorter than that of /l/ (Punnoose 2011;Tabain & Kochetov 2018), which is consistent with the finding of duration for Tamil. As for Kannada, descriptive phonetic accounts disagree on the exact place of the articulation of its non-retroflex coronal lateral /l/: some describe it as 'dental' (Bright 1958), others as 'alveolar' (Upadhyaya 1972), but they unanimously characterize /í/ as retroflex, with some noting its subapical articulation.…”

“…While the Tamil /í/ has sublingual articulation with palatal constriction, /í/ in Malayalam has a considerable tongue root retraction and a substantial tongue blade raising and retraction (Scobbie et al 2013). Acoustic studies show a higher F1, lower F2 and lower F3 in /í/ than in /l/ (Punnoose 2011;Punnoose et al 2013;Tabain & Kochetov 2018). The lower F2 in /í/ is the opposite to the finding for F2 in Tamil.…”

“…Both the Dravidian languages of India and the indigenous languages of Australia are well known for having an alveolar versus retroflex contrast in the consonant system (Bhat 1973;Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). Studies on retroflex laterals are reported for Dravidian languages spoken in South Asia (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), including Tamil (McDonough & Johnson 1997;, Malayalam (Punnoose et al 2013;Scobbie et al 2013;Tabain & Kochetov 2018) and Kannada (Tabain & Kochetov 2018), and in Australian Aboriginal languages, such as Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri (Tabain et al 2016;Tabain et al 2020a;Tabain et al 2020b). Other fragmentary reports on retroflex laterals are found in Gujarati (Dave 1977) among the Indo-Aryan languages and in East Norwegian (Hamann 2003a;Moen et al 2003) among the North Germanic languages.…”

Cross-language comparison of long-term average speech spectrum and dynamic range for three Indian languages and British English

“…Differences in phoneme distribution have been reported for Hindi [14], Kannada [15] and several other Indian languages [16]. Further, acoustic properties of Indian phonemes are also markedly different vis-à-vis English, as reported by Kochetov and Sreedevi [17] and Tabain and Kochetov [18]. Such differences may be a source of a marked difference in LTASS for Indian languages relative to English.…”

Phonetic variation in the Korean liquid phoneme

“…However, the F3 model which has significantly lower F3 for laterals in pre-pausal position and before consonants. Lowered F3 is a property of retroflex laterals, as Tabain et al (2016) and Tabain and Kochetov (2018) have shown for languages retroflex laterals that contrast with other coronal-laterals. Thus, the models suggests that the retroflex realization of the Korean lateral is more wide-spread than suggested in Hwang et al (2019), occurring not only word-finally but in word-internal syllable-final positions, as well.…”