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Vowel spaces in Plains Cree

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2012

Jeffrey Muehlbauer
Jeffrey Muehlbauer*
Affiliation:
The University of [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study of the acoustic correlates of the Plains Cree vowel system. Naturalistic recordings of speakers of mid-20th-century Plains Cree, including one monolingual speaker, provide an empirical test for the general expectations from phonological descriptions. The results demonstrate that, while the hypothesized short/long vowel pairs do indeed have a strong durational contrast, the majority of vowel pairs are also distinguished by their formants. In all cases, the long vowel occupies a more extreme position in the vowel space. Plains Cree thus appears to show both a quantity and a quality contrast in its vowel pairs. The individual speaker data are then normalized to test whether there is intra-speaker variation in these results, with the results showing variation in the relation between vowels in all three parts of the vowel space.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 91 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2012

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