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 ofWolaytta 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 effect of pre-fortis clipping on duration of the short vowels was not 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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Linguistics