A study of the production and perception of ' in Tsimane'
Résumé
A study of the production and perception of 〈’〉 in Tsimane’. Tsimane’ is a language spoken in Bolivia by several thousand people and yet the phonology of Tsimane’ has not been described in detail. With this project, we want to take a step towards better description by focusing on an aspect of language that we find particularly unusual : the sound represented in spelling with 〈’〉, usually analyzed as a glottal stop /P/. We hypothesized that 〈’〉 is a glottal flap. We recorded two adult speakers of Tsimane’ producing (near-)minimal pairs involving this sound. In this paper, we present analyses focused on a syllable extracted from six minimal pairs : /ki-kiP/. Analyses of the spectrograms suggested one speaker consistently used vowel glottalization and to a lesser extent closure, whereas these were ambiguous in our other informant. However, presentation of the key syllables to these two informants and two other adult Tsimane’ listeners revealed clear evidence that they could clearly recover the intended syllable. Together, these data suffice to rule out our initial hypothesis of a glottal flap, since a closure was never obvious in one of the speakers, and suggests instead a more complex set of acoustic cues may be at listeners’ disposal.