Some acoustic characteristics of the geminates in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan

Résumé En

Ikema is an endangered Miyako Ryukyuan dialect spoken in the Okinawa islands of Japan,having a set of voiced/voiceless geminates in word-initial and medial positions. Among its obstruents,the geminates /tt ff ss vv zz tts/ appear in initial and medial positions (/tta/ ‘tongue’, /ffa/ ‘child’, /ssa/‘grass’, /vva/ ‘you’, /zzu/ ‘fish’, /avva/ ‘oil’) and the geminate /dd/ occurs only in medial position(/badda/ ‘side’). This paper is an acoustic description of some aspects of these geminates, as a followupto the rt-MRI study by Fujimoto and Shinohara (2015), which showed articulatory differencesbetween voiceless and voiced, as well as singleton and geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzedsets of real words uttered several times in isolation by five native speakers by using oscillograms andspectrograms. First, we confirmed longer closure duration for plosives and affricates and longerfrication noise for fricatives in geminates as compared to singletons. Second, our acoustic analysesfound full voicing of voiced geminates in Ikema. This result seems to be a consequence of pharyngealexpansion identified in the MRI study during voiced geminate constriction. Third, VOT wassystematically shorter for the geminate voiceless plosive (/tt/) compared to its singleton counterpart.This corresponds to the faster transition from the geminate consonants to the following vowel found inthe MRI study.