Characteristics of non-pre-vocalic ejectives in Northwest Sahaptin

Abstract

Northwest Sahaptin, like many languages of the Pacific Northwest, has a contrast between ejective and non-ejective stops and affricates before voiceless consonants and word-finally. This article presents the results of an instrumental study of how the contrast is signaled in these contexts. Word-finally, ejectives are often realized as creaky voice on the vowel immediately before the ejective, which may in fact be realized as a fricative. Pre-consonantally, for ejective stops, the salient phonetic characteristic of the contrast is heightened burst amplitude. For ejective affricates, frication amplitude is not a reliable correlate of ejectivity. Instead, the only reliable phonetic correlate of ejectivity for ejective affricates is a silent period when the following segment is a fricative. The same characteristics hold for pre-vocalic ejectives. Neither pre-vocalic nor pre-consonantal ejectives are marked by preceding jitter, as in the word-final case.