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Komi-Permyak Coronal Obstruents: Acoustic Contrasts And Positional Variation, Alexei Kochetov, Alevtina Lobanova

Alexei Kochetov

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 …