The second formants of the laterals in Turkish

Yıl 2020, Cilt: 16 Sayı: 2, 510 - 520, 24.06.2020

Göktuğ Börtlü

https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.759237

Öz

The study shows that there are two distinct lateral phonemes in Turkish with a minimal pair example. 20 male native speakers of Turkish, aged 20-26, were asked to read six short phrases and a minimal pair which contained laterals. The spectrograms were examined by PRAAT to determine whether it is possible to identify the laterals with regard to their second formants. As the laterals could have been greatly affected by the formants of the surrounding sounds, they were detected by following acoustic cues and the F2 values were gathered at the middle of these sounds, which minimized the impact of the other sounds. The non-velarized lateral /l/ is marked by a higher F2 than the velarized lateral /ɫ̪/ because of a tongue raising gesture. In order to distinguish between the two laterals, the Mann-Whitney U test was employed based on their F2 values in the minimal pair example, for α = 0.01. With reference to the data, it appears that there is a statistically significant difference between the F2 values of the laterals (p < 0.01). There is strong evidence that second formants help define the laterals in Turkish.

Anahtar Kelimeler

lateral; phoneme; Turkish; formant; phonetics

Kaynakça

• Bauer, R. S., & Benedict, P. K. (1997). Modern Cantonese phonology. Mouton de Gruyter. Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1995). Gestural syllable position effects in American English. In F. Bell-Berti & L.J. Raphael (Eds.), Producing speech: contemporary issues. For K. S. Harris (pp. 19-34). Woodbury, NY: AIP Press. Harris, J. W., & Kaisse, E. M. (1999). Palatal vowels, glides and obstruents in Argentinian Spanish. Phonology, 16(2), 117-190. Ladefoged, P., & Johnson, K. (2010). A course in phonetics. Wadsworth. Ladefoged, P., & Maddieson, I. (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Blackwell. Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge University Press. Mielke, J. (2005). Ambivalence and ambiguity in laterals and nasals. Phonology, 22(2), 169-203. Narayanan, S. S., Alwan, A. A., & Haker, K. (1997). Toward articulatory-acoustic models for liquid approximants based on MRI and EPG data, part I: The laterals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(2), 1064-1077. Parker, S. (2008). Sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority. Journal of Phonetics, 36(1), 55-90. Piñeros, C. (2003). Accounting for the instability of Palenquero voiced stops. Lingua, 113(12), 1185-1222. Recasens, D., & Espinosa, A. (2005). Articulatory, positional and coarticulatory characteristics for clear /l/ and dark /l/: evidence from two Catalan dialects. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 35(1), 1-25. Rosner, B., & Pickering, J. (1994). Vowel perception and production. Oxford University Press. Stevens, K. N., & House, A. S. (1963). Perturbation of vowel articulations by consonantal context: An acoustical study. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 6(2), 111-128. Yip, M. (2011). Lateral consonants. In M. van Oostendorp, C. ‎ J. Ewen, E. V. ‎ Hume, & K. ‎ Rice, The Blackwell Companion to Phonology (pp. 2278-2294). Wiley-Blackwell.