Phonetic Description of a Three-way Stop Contrast in Northern Paiute

This paper presents the phonetic description of a three-way phonemic contrast in the medial stops (lenis, fortis, and voiced fortis stops) of a southern dialect of Northern Paiute.Qualitative and quantitative analysis of VOT, closure duration, and voice quality was performed on field recordings of a female speaker from the 1950s.The findings include that: 1) voiced fortis stops are realized phonetically as voiceless unaspirated stops; 2) the difference between fortis and voiced fortis and between voiced fortis and lenis in terms of VOT is subtle; 3) consonantal duration is a robust acoustic characteristic differentiating the three classes of stops; 4) lenis stops are characterized by a smooth VC transition, while fortis stops often exhibit aspiration at the VC juncture, and voiced fortis stops exhibit occasional glottalization at the VC juncture.These findings suggest that the three-way contrast is realized by combination of multiple phonetic properties, particularly the properties that occur at the vowel-consonant boundary rather than the consonantal release. Final featuresEffects in current Numic languages *Series 1 (unmarked)Lenition in all languages *Series 2 (marked as [ ])Fortition in all languages that have series 2 feature *Series 3 (marked as [ ]) Penasalization in Shoshone and Southern Paiute Voiced fortis in SNNP Merged to series 2 in all other languages *Series 4 (marked as [ h ]) (Pre)aspiration in all languages that have series 4 feature * This feature appears only before sonorant-hj, hwTABLE 2 Shoshone morphemes with final features (from Miller 1996)