Presentation: Hsiang-yu
Summary: Sarah
This study aims to
examine the dialectal variation of voiced stops’ prenasalization in Greek. In
view of the fact that the presence of prenasalization is mostly impressionistically
judged in previous studies, acoustic measurements of duration and amplitude are
adopted in the present study to more objectively capture the phenomenon. Linguistic
factors include stress and word position. In addition to the comparison between
northern and southern Greek dialects, gender difference is also investigated. A
total of 24 native Greeks participated in the production experiment. Stimuli
were words containing nasals and voiced stops. These target sounds occurred in both
stressed and unstressed syllables, in word-initial and word-medial positions. Results
showed that amplitude trajectory across different time points is a reliable
measurement for nasality. Crucially, all speaker groups except for males of the
southern dialect displayed evidence of prenasalizing voiced stops in both
stress and word conditions. Nonetheless, the results should be taken with caution
given the great individual differences observed in this study. Future studies will
further pursue this issue with more considerations of participants’ linguistic
background.
