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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 47:1 (2024) ► pp.32–56

Voice onset time in Angami

| Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
| Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

Angami has three-way laryngeal contrasts in stops, i.e., voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated. Apart from that, Angami also has four phonetically level tones. Due to the level nature of the lexical tones in Angami, consonantal perturbations could be investigated clearly. The results of the study showed that the extent of consonantal perturbation depended on the tonal categories. Voiceless consonantal perturbations were weaker as tone categories got higher. Conversely, voiced stop consonantal perturbations were weaker as tone categories got lower. This study also found a systematic relationship between tone height and VOT duration. High tones induced shorter VOT, while low tones induced longer VOT.

Keywords: Tibeto-Burman, Angami, VOT, tones
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Angami language
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Speakers
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Recording of the data
    • 3.4VOT annotation and extraction
    • 3.5F Extraction using Zero-frequency filtering (ZFF)
    • 3.6Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1VOT in Angami stops
    • 4.2Tone effects on VOT in Angami
    • 4.3VOT effects on tones in Angami
  • 5.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.00016.ter
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