Pre-aspiration and post-aspiration in Scottish Gaelic stop consonants

Abstract

This paper aims to describe pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops in an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic. Our small-scale study investigates several acoustic parameters of Scottish Gaelic stop consonants designed to measure the duration and noisiness of aspiration of the stop in its immediate phonetic context. Our study expands on previous phonetic descriptions of phonemic (pre-)aspiration in three ways: firstly, we provide a more complete durational description of Scottish Gaelic than previous work in the literature; secondly, we apply a new measure, band-pass filtered zero crossing rate (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), in order to examine the noisiness of aspiration in addition to durational characteristics. The results from this measure are presented in tandem with durational results in order to assess its usefulness for future research. Thirdly, we consider the possibility of change in the Scottish Gaelic stop system by examining data from older and younger speakers. Results suggest that band-pass filtered zero crossing rate is a useful tool and should be considered in future research on aspiration. Also, durational and zero crossing results indicate that younger speakers have shorter and less noisy pre-aspiration than older speakers. We discuss these results as a possible sound change in progress.

Pre-aspiration, quantity, and sound change

“…Phonologically contrastive pre-aspirated stops are described as rare in the world's languages (cf. Silverman 2003) and are associated mainly with Icelandic and other languages spoken in far northwestern Europe (cf., e.g., Pind [1996] on Icelandic; Nance and Stuart-Smith [2013] on Scottish Gaelic). Optional pre-aspiration in the production of voiceless stops is a widespread tendency in dialects spoken throughout Scandinavia (Helgason 2002).…”

Voice Onset Time (VOT) at 50: Theoretical and practical issues in measuring voicing distinctions

“…80 ms for both, extrapolating from the figures) (Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Turk, Hind, & Skilton, 1998, p. 10), but, for their speakers at least, there is approximately 35 ms of aspiration after the release as well (p. 11). Indeed, Nance and Stuart-Smith (2013) measure both duration of preaspiration and VOT. In general, the total duration of the devoicing associated with the aspirated stop extends from the previous vocalic segment (the pre-aspiration) to the onset of voicing in the following vocalic segment.…”

On the Origin of Post-Aspirated Stops: Production and Perception of /s/ + Voiceless Stop Sequences in Andalusian Spanish

“…Circles stand for younger, dots for older speaker-listeners; black for WAS, grey for EAS subjects. (Clayton, 2010;Nance & Stuart-Smith, 2013;Ní Chasaide, 1985) or dialects of Swedish (Helgason & Ringen, 2008), where pre-aspiration is reported to be longer in the velar than in the bilabial context. The longer pre-aspiration duration preceding velar stops is likely to be due to articulatory factors, that is, to a slower movement of the tongue back as opposed to the tongue tip and the lips in dental and bilabial stops (Helgason & Ringen, 2008).…”