This thesis reports voice onset time (VOT) of word–initial ejectives, implosives, and plain stops in Mopan, Itzaj, and Yukateko Maya. In this study, implosive bilabials and bilabial, alveolar, and velar ejectives and plain stops in word–initial position from Mopan, Itzaj, and Yukateko speakers were measured from the stop release to the onset of voicing of the following vowel, and results were compared to VOT of other languages with the same phonemes. All three languages have long average (negative) VOTs for implosives, contradicting Schumann–Galvez's claim that both Itzaj (2000) and Mopan (1997) have unaspirated rather than implosive voiced bilabials. Among other results, Yukateko had a very long VOT for plain velar stops, only slightly shorter than its velar ejective, and the average VOT of the plain bilabial voiceless stop in Mopan was actually longer than the corresponding ejective. Further study of these anomalies is warranted.

This dissertation is an acoustic description of the phonemic inventory of Nez Perce [nez], a Penutian language of the United States. Acoustic work has been conducted on the consonants of Nez Perce, but no acoustic work has been conducted on the vowels or vowel harmony system. This work begins with an overview of the dissertation, language situation, and previous research. Following the introduction are chapters on ejectives and plain obstruents, plain and glottalized sonorants, vowels, vowel harmony, and the conclusion. Nez Perce has both plain and ejective stop series, a plain and ejective affricate series, and a plain fricative series. I examine these segments for acoustic correlates comparing them to previous research, other languages and current theory. The ejectives are described with f0, intensity, jitter, burst amplitude and VOT. I discuss fricatives in terms of spectra, duration, formant transitions, and moments. The timing and realization of glottalization on glottalized and plain sonorants is investigated. Segments are measured for duration and are visually and aurally inspected for variation of glottalization, realized using pitch, laryngealization, glottal stops, or a combination of these features. It is nearly always realized on the sonorant rather than before or after. Vowels are plotted and compared to previous phonological descriptions. The inventory is /i, æ, a, o, u/ rather than the canonical five-vowel system, leading to the description of the inventory as having a “gap” and not maximally contrastive. I suggest that if Nez Perce vowels are considered using a shifted axis then the vowels are maximally contrastive. The non-canonical vowel inventory leads to two seeming unrelated vowel harmony sets: dominant, /i, a, o/, and recessive, /i, æ, u/. The proposed shifted axis view becomes important for reanalyzing the vowel harmony to reconcile these unusual sets. Previous analyses have described Nez Perce vowel harmony as based on advanced tongue root (ATR). I investigated Nez Perce vowels for ATR acoustic correlates; however, the results provide evidence both supporting and not supporting an ATR analysis. I propose an alternate analysis for the vowel harmony based on the principle of maximal contrast, evidenced by the shifted axis model.

Stops are one of the most common sounds across languages of the world. Among these pervasive sounds, ejectives form a unique group that is distinguishable from other types of stops. Their particular mechanism of articulation, such as larynx raising and unusually high oral pressure, separates them from the others. More interestingly, a listener perceives them differently and makes a distinction from non-ejective, or pulmonic, stops. What is it that we perceive when hearing ejectives? Do we perceive certain acoustic cues or auditory qualities that are part of their distinctive phonetic nature? Are these phonetic characteristics always distinctive? In other words, is our perception of the ejectives always consistent without any variation at the phonetic level? Motivated by these questions and from my recent exposure to Tsilhqut’in ejectives, I set out to pursue a phonetic investigation of these intriguing sounds. The present study is composed of two main analyses. One is an acoustic analysis that instrumentally examines a dataset of ejective and non-ejective stops in the Tsilhqut’in language with respect to acoustic dimensions such as Voice Onset Time (VOT) in order to compare all the stop classes in terms of their acoustic properties. Such a comparison helps to phonetically characterize the ejectives within the language. The acoustic measures also enable us to compare the characteristics of Tsilhqut’in ejectives with those in other languages, based on previously reported acoustic correlates. In order to determine the characteristics of ejectives across languages, Tsilhqut’in ejectives were compared with ejectives in different languages (e.g., Inguish). The other analysis is auditory, whereby I have examined how I perceived a subset of the ejectives taken out of the whole dataset and compared my auditory judgments with the acoustic measurements in order to find any correlation between results from the two analyses. The findings of the study indicate that Tsilhqut’in ejectives do not follow a traditional binary typology of ejectives. That is, they are neither strong nor weak, as is often claimed in the literature. They are congruent with what recent studies (e.g., Warner 1996) have found of ejectives in other languages – phonetic variability. This means that the dichotomy cannot account for the variability in ejectives at the phonetic level and that an optimal way of classifying ejectives across languages still awaits discovery. To the best of my knowledge, no other phonetic study has been conducted on Tsilhqut’in ejectives prior to the current study. Moreover, there has been little research or documentation carried out on any other phonetic aspects or sounds of this Athabaskan language. I expect that this instrumental study will contribute to the field of linguistics by adding new phonetic knowledge about such a rarely studied language, and I also expect the present study to play a role in the understanding of language learning and of language revitalization around the world.