Labial-Velar Stop Place Identification in Igbo
Roslyn Burns, Jason Shaw
March 2024 

Previous research shows that simplex dorsals in the context of /i/-like vowels can be misperceived as coronal, a pattern which is more likely for voiceless segments than for voiced ones. We explore the effect of vowel context on the perception of labial-velar stops, pursing the hypothesis that the pattern observed for simplex velar stops will generalize to complex labial-velars. We opted for a cross language perception study with Igbo participants listening to stimuli produced by a Nupe speaker. Our results show that while listeners mostly mispercieved labial-velars as labials, voiced labial-velars are sometimes perceived as coronal before /i/-like vowels, similar to what is observed for simplex dorsals. Voiceless labial-velars, on the other hand, did not exhibit this pattern.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007978 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Selected Proceedings of the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics
keywords:	perception, labial-velar, west africa, igbo, nupe, sound change, online survey, palatalization, simplex, complex, velar, dorsal, phonology
Downloaded:	106 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]