Komi-Permyak coronal obstruents: acoustic contrasts and positional variation

Abstract

Komi-Permyak (Finno-Ugric) has a typologically rare contrast between palatal stops and palatal affricates; the latter are also contrastive with postalveolar affricates. In addition, the language has a relatively uncommon three-way place contrast among sibilant fricatives. This paper investigates acoustic properties of the Komi-Permyak voiceless coronal obstruents in different positional contexts. An acoustic analysis of data from six native speakers of the language revealed that the contrasts were well differentiated by a combination of duration, noise intensity, spectral shapes, and vowel transitions – consistently with previous studies of similar consonants in other languages. The results also showed some positional differences in the realization of the consonants. Overall, the study contributes to a better understanding of phonetic implementation of marked phonological contrasts and positional variation; it also provides an acoustic record of the endangered language.