Vo w e l q u a l it y a n d d u r a t io n in De g Xin a g

1. i n t r o d u c t i o n Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language spoken in western Alaska, has been described as containing the following vowel inventory: /e a o a u/ (Krauss 1962, Leer 1979). The vowel “/u/” is restricted in distribution in Deg Xinag, only occurring adjacent to uvulars. Deg Xinag “/u/” is a reflex of Proto-Athabaskan *u, but /u/ in Deg Xinag gives the auditory impression of being a short version of /o/. If true, then Deg Xinag would be typologically unusual in having no high vowel phonemes. This study investigated the following questions: what are the spectral properties of the Deg Xinag vowels? Which vowels are significantly different in duration? 2. METHOD 2.1 Participants Participants are 8 adult native speakers (3 male, 5 female) of Deg Xinag, between the ages of approximately 68-76 at the time of recording. English is a second language for all speakers, but proficiency varies. 2.2 Recording materials and recording procedure Two word lists were constructed. In a word list constructed for measuring vowel duration, words were recorded in a sentence context. Vowels were recorded in one of two consonantal contexts: surrounded by coronal stops, or preceded by a uvular stop and followed by a coronal stop. In another word list constructed for measuring vowel quality, words were recorded in isolation. The vowel quality word list recorded the vowels in several consonantal contexts: preceded and followed by coronal stops; preceded by a uvular consonant; followed by a uvular consonant. On both the vowel quality and vowel duration word lists, words or sentences were recorded in random order (the same random order for each speaker). Four repetitions were elicited. Some speakers voluntarily produced more than four repetitions. Some repetitions were later excluded due to excess background noise or some similar reason. Because no speaker was literate in Deg Xinag, the words were elicited through a combination of translation from English and/or prompting in Deg Xinag. Recordings were made using a professional CD recorder or compact flash recorder with an AT 4041 microphone attached. Data was recorded at 44,100 Hz and downsampled to 11,025 Hz. 2.4 Statistical analysis The vowel duration measures were subjected to repeated measures analysis of variance, with the dependent variable being each speaker’s mean vowel duration for each vowel category. Vowel was the independent variable. Post hoc analysis was performed with Fisher’s PLSD. 3. RESULTS 3.1 Spectral properties of vowels