An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Duration in Wolaytta Doonaa
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Date
2017-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This acoustic study investigates the vowels‟ duration of Wolaytta Doonaa, a language spoken in the south west part of Ethiopia, by the Wolaytta people. The vowels set for the analysis were delimited by the alveolar obstruent consonants‟ CVC frame. Each vowel comprising of short and long acoustic representations with both accented and unaccented equivalents were taken for the analysis. The duration of the vowels within the recorded sound files were separated and were measured with Praat script in milliseconds and analysis was made depending on the tongue height, gender, accent status and the adjacent consonants so as to determine their mean scores and degree of variations due to these impacts on their intrinsic and extrinsic durations. The results showed that the durations of the vowels of Wolaytta Doonaa have significant variation due to the tongue height and the tongue advancement, thus, as a vowel in Wolaytta Doonaa is lower, its acoustic duration is longer. In addition to that, women utter longer vowels than men do; plus, the accented vowels portray longer duration than their unaccented counterparts. Besides, the effectofpre-fortis clipping on duration of the short vowels wasnot attested in the finding, thus, the impact of post-vocalic voiceless obstruents on the duration of the preceding vowel was not significant.
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An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Duration