MaÌ€daÌ Stop Consonants: An Instrumental Study

Abstract

This paper is an acoustic phonetic study of the stop consonants in MaÌ€daÌ, a Central Nigerian language spoken in Nasarawa state of Nigeria. The analysis contained in this work is based on an annotated audio corpus of digital recordings from two adult male speakers. The digital recordings were made with an Edirol r-09 digital recorder at a sample rate of 44.1KHz, 24 bit wav files in either mono or stereo quality and saved as .wav files in Praat. The study aims to describe the phonetic facts of MaÌ€daÌ stop consonants and to illustrate the types of contrasts which distinguish them from one another. The paper investigated two major cues for stop consonants, the burst of the stop release and the formant transitions in the adjacent vowel. The study investigated place and voicing contrasts of MaÌ€daÌ stop consonants. In order to examine the place contrast of the stop consonants, the release burst and the transition of F2 were checked. In an attempt to authenticate the place for velar stops, F3 was examined. To investigate the voicing contrast of MaÌ€daÌ stop consonants, the release burst and the transition of F1 were compared. Comparisons between voicing durations show that voiced stops have longer durations than their voiceless counterparts. Altogether, the study indicated that the voiceless stop release bursts were brief; voiced stops had F1 transition while voiceless stops did not have.