Perceived duration in vowel-length based Civili minimal pairs

Abstract

Several authors have established the existence of short and long vowels on the basis of minimal pairs occurring in Civili. These works however simply refer to impressionistic phonetic observations and do not rely on experimentally-gathered and verified data. This article focuses on the perceived duration of components of minimal pairs. It is intended to assess the validity of claims on vowel length and minimal pairs in the language. The article gives an account of a perception experiment that was conducted and describes the administration of perception tests. The perceptual data gathered are then statistically analysed and discussed in terms of phonological implications.

Perception of ATR in Dàgááre [dàɡáárɪ̀]

“…Based on a systematic literature review of literature since 2000, we are aware of a total of only eight published, peer-reviewed journal articles directly testing perception of African languages by native speakers in that time frame. At the word level, lexical tone perception has been investigated in Dinka (Remijsen, 2013), Yoruba (Harrison, 2000), Mambila (Connell, 2000), and Shona (Kadyamusuma, 2012), and there are also studies of tonal spreading in Bemba verb forms (Kula & Braun, 2015) and vowel length contrasts in Civili (Ndinga- Koumba-Binza & Roux, 2009). At the sentence level, perception of prosody and/or semantic focus has been explored in Akan (Genzel & Kügler, 2020) and Sepedi (Turco & Zerbian, 2021).…”

Language Science and Language Technology in Africa: Festschrift for Justus C. Roux

“…An account of how perceptual data should be acquired and how perceptual data were used in NdingaKoumba-Binza (2008) has indeed been the subject of other publications by NdingaKoumba-Binza (2009, 2011 & 2012), Ndinga-Koumba-Binza and Roux (2009aRoux ( & 2009b, and Roux and Ndinga-Koumba-Binza (2011).…”