Voice Onset Time and beyond: Exploring laryngeal contrast in 19 languages

Abstract

In this special collection entitled Marking 50 Years of Research on Voice Onset Time and the Voicing Contrast in the World's Languages, we have compiled eleven studies investigating the voicing contrast in 19 languages. The collection provides extensive data obtained from 270 speakers across those languages, examining VOT and other acoustic, aerodynamic and articulatory measures. The languages studied may be divided into four groups: 'aspirating' languages with a two-way contrast (English, three varieties of German); 'true voicing' languages with a two-way contrast (Russian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, two Iranian languages Pashto and Wakhi); languages with a three-way contrast (Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, Yerevan Armenia, three Indo-Aryan languages, Dawoodi, Punjabi and Shina, and Burushaki spoken in India); and Indo-Aryan languages with a more than three-way contrast (Jangli and Urdu with a four-way contrast, and Sindhi and Siraiki with a five-way contrast). We discuss the cross-linguistic data, focusing on how much VOT alone tell s us above the voicing contrast in these languages, and what other phonetic dimensions (such as consonant-induced F0 and voice quality) are needed for a complete understanding of laryngeal contrast in these languages. Implications for various issues emerge: universal phonetic feature systems, effects of language contact on linguistic levelling, and the relation between laryngeal contrast and supralaryngeal articulation. The cross-linguistic VOT data also lead us to discuss how the distribution of VOT as measured acoustically may allow us to infer the underlying articulation and how it might be approached in gestural phonologies. The discussion on these multiple issues sparks new questions to be resolved, and provide indications of where the field may be best directed in exploring laryngeal contrast in voicing in the world's languages.

Figure 1.

Distribution of mean VOTs in languages studied in this special collection (see Section 1.1 for the references): (a) voiceless unaspirated category along the positive VOT dimension and (b) two voiceless categories along the positive VOT dimension. VOTs in three languages (Lebanese Arabic, Swiss German, Turkish) were obtained from words produced in a sentence frame, and the rest were from words in isolation. VOTs were taken from (denti-)alveolars, except for the ones in Swiss German whose values were pooled across different places of articulation. Note that tokens produced with some voicing during closure are excluded in Lebanese Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and American English. (English data were taken from Ahn, 2018a, this collection). Note also that the mean VOT values for alveolar stops in Lebanese Arabic were obtained directly from the authors of Al-Tamimi and Khattab (2018, this collection) and in the original paper, they reported mean VOTs pooled across different places of articulation (8.7 ms for geminates and 5.3 ms for singletons).

Figure 2.

Mean VOTs of phonetically voiced (denti-) alveolar stops in 17 languages studied in this special collection. Stops were produced in words in isolation in all languages but Yerevan Armenian for which they were produced in a frame sentence.

Figure 3.

The Articulatory VOT continuum in which the timing of vocal fold vibration gesture relative to C-closing gesture determines VOT distributions of both voiced and voiceless stops across languages.