PATTERNS OF SPEECH SOUNDS
IN UNSCRIPTED COMMUNICATION

Abstract:

SOME PATTERNS OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH IN HINDI

Manjari Ohala

This paper will present data from a small corpus of unscripted speech gathered from one male and one female adult native speaker of Hindi. The speech was taped in the speakers' residence using high quality portable equipment. Select portions of the tape were digitized and analyzed via waveform and spectrograms.

The aim is to further the research agenda proposed by Kohler (1991, 1995) towards looking at such data in a number of different languages to gain insight into "...general language-independent scales of articulatory effort..." and to see if some of Kohler's specific claims (for example, that apical gestures show greater instability) hold for Hindi. It also extends some of the data presented in Ohala 1997, 1999.

Some specifics:

• Stops showed weakening and were often articulated as fricatives or even as glides. Thus changes such as intended /b/ pronounced as were found as well as velar stops (both voiced and voiceless) becoming fricatives. Interestingly, no cases were found of intended /p/ becoming [f] nor of the dental stops becoming fricatives (contrary to Kohler's findings regarding apicals).
• Some stop +stop sequences showed durations appropriate to geminate consonants. E.g., "seem + participle" was rendered with a having a duration more suitable for a geminate. (Perceptual tests are underway to see if such 'pseudo-geminates' are perceived as true geminates).
• The familiar casual speech neutralization of voicing and aspiration in word-final stops or before voiceless obstruents had its parallel in spontaneous speech, e.g., 'lion + of' was realized .

References

Kohler, K. J. 1991. The organization of speech production clues from the study of reduction processes. In: Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aix-en-Provence, France. 102-106.

Kohler, K. J. 1995. Articulatory reduction in different speaking styles. In: Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. 1: 12-19.

Ohala, M. 1997. Connected speech in Hindi: Implications for sound change. In: Jane H. Hill et al (eds) The Life of Language. Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 463-471.

Ohala, M. 1999. The seeds of sound change: Data from connected speech. Linguistics in the Morning Calm 4. Edited by The Linguistic Society of Korea. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company. 263-274.