Phonetic Structures of Scottish Gaelic

A quantitative & qualitative phonetic analysis of acoustic data of Scottish Gaelic utterances collected in a word elicitation production experiment (N = 7 male & 4 female native speakers, aged 63-88). The recorded utterances were digitized at 22,050 hertz & analyzed with the Macquirer computer speech analysis system; measurements were made on waveforms & wide band spectrograms. The phonological inventory of consonants includes plain or palatalized labial, coronal, & velar sounds. There are six manners of articulation: stops, nasals, fricatives, rhotics, approximants, & laterals. The consonants were quantitatively & qualitatively analyzed with respect to voicing & palatalization. The vowel system comprises nine vowels, each with a contrastive length. The short & long vowels were measured for formant frequencies, & the vowel space was plotted as a function of the first & second formant. The distinctions between three high non-front vowels, as originally reported by C. H. Borgdstorm (1940), were confirmed by some speakers. In addition, aerodynamic & palatographic data were collected from one male subject. It is shown that differences in syllabification for pairs, eg, balg & ballag, can be acoustically confirmed because the two types show different pitch tracks. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. S. Godjevac