Co-existence of Tone and Phonation in Punjabi: An Acoustic Study
Keywords:
Tone, Phonation, Punjabi language, Acoustic studyAbstract
This study investigates the co-existence of two laryngeal speech phenomena, i.e., tone and phonation, in the Punjabi language. Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language that is tonal with three tone types. The stimuli consisted of three sets of mono-syllabic words with each set having three words different from one another only due to their different tone. Recording of the words was done in a silent room with the help of a good-quality WAV file recorder. Ten native speakers (five male and five female) of the language were recorded five times for each word. The speakers were selected conveniently from Lahore, Pakistan. The recordings were analyzed acoustically with the help of software: Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2014) and ProsodyPro (Xu, 2014). The acoustic correlates of phonation including H1-H2, H1*-H2*, and CPP were measured. SPSS was also used for the statistical analyses. A one-way ANOVA test was applied, followed by a post-hoc Bonferroni test. The results of the study prove that tone and phonation co-exist in the language in a significant way. The low tone co-exists with the breathy phonation type and the high tone co-exists with the tensest phonation.
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