Voicing, aspiration and f 0 properties of Hindi stops

The extant body of work on the phonetics and phonology of voiced aspiration
in Hindi has focused primarily on the post release aspiration phase; (Ladefoged and
Maddieson 1996), (Dixit 1987) and regarded the distinctions in the duration of voicing
during closure (VLT) between voiced aspirated stops (VAS) and voiced stops (VS)
to be insignificant towards maintaining contrast between these stops. Voicing is also
universally expected to reduce f 0 of the following vowel; (House and Fairbanks 1953)
and (House and Fairbanks 1953), but until Schiefer (1986) there had been no study
investigating whether VAS and VS depress pitch to a comparable degree. Schiefer
(1986) and Schiefer (1989) has also shown that both (a) the f 0 of the vowel following
the VAS is considerably reduced and (b) listeners prefer longer VLT durations for
unambiguous perception of VS vis-µa-vis VAS.

These studies provide a foundation for a comprehensive study of the voicing, aspi-
ration and f 0 properties of stops in Hindi. The remaining concerns that needed to be
addressed were (1) effects of prosodic context, (2) effects of neighbouring consonantal
and vocalic contexts on these cues, and (3) cross-comparison of cue effects between the
four stops types. In this paper, results from a larger acoustic phonetic study of Hindi
stops are presented. The paper seeks to study the interaction of these cues among the
four stop types.

Data was elicited from 5 native Hindi speakers (3 female and 2 male subjects).
Material consisted of recordings of Hindi VAS, VS, voiceless stops (VLS), and voiceless
aspirated stops (VLAS) in frame sentences. 3 repetitions of each item and 3 lexical
items for each stop type were recorded. Prosodic contexts consisted of 3 types, namely,
phrase initial (PI), utterance (UI) initial, phrase medial (PM). The target words were
of the type CVC, where C was the target stop. All of the words had a long [a] vowel.
The material was presented in a randomized order.

Results: Effect of prosodic context was found to be marginally signifcant for three
of the five speakers. Significant effect of Stop type was found on the f 0 of the following
vowel. For four of the five subjects duration of aspiration for VAS was significantly
longer than that for VLAS. Preliminary results also show that VLT durations for VAS
are signi¯cantly lower than the VLT durations for VS for at least three subjects.

References

Dixit, R. P.: 1987, Mechanisms for voicing and aspiration: Hindi and other languages com-
pared, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 67, 49:102.

House, A. and Fairbanks, G.: 1953, The in°uence of consonant environment upon the sec-
ondary acoustical characteristics of vowels, JASA 25, 105:113.

Ladefoged, P. and Maddieson, I.: 1996, The sounds' of the world's languages, Oxford: Black-
well.

Schiefer, L.: 1986, F0 in the production and perception of breathy stops: Evidence from
hindi, Phonetica 43, 43:69.

Schiefer, L.: 1989, Voiced aspirated or breathy voiced and the case for articulatory phonol ogy, Forschungsberichte des Instituts fÄur Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation der
Universitat Maunchen pp. 257:278.