Acoustic characteristics of Deg Xinag fricatives

Abstract

This article presents an acoustic study of the contrast between seven fricatives in two positions (before [a], after [a]) using data from 8 speakers of Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language of Alaska. An initial set of 52 measures of various properties of the fricative and adjacent [a] was narrowed to 13 non-correlated measures. Although no single measure distinguished all pairs of fricatives in either position, fricatives before [a] were generally differentiated by energy profile whereas differentiation of fricatives after [a] relied more heavily on formant transitions. In a subsequent experiment, statistical analyses were performed to help understand why *ɬ and *θ, which are distinct in Deg Xinag, have merged as /ɬ/ in the closely related language Koyukon. An additional experiment determined that one contentious Deg Xinag fricative, which has been variously transcribed as [χ] or [h], has more of the characteristics of /χ/ despite considerable inter-speaker variation.