Matthew Faytak

The present paper advocates for incorporating Big Team Science practices into the language sciences. Big Team Science is a promising mode of collaborative research in which top-down coordination directs efforts by a large number of researchers from different institutions towards a common scientific goal. The redistribution of resources and division of labor enabled by Big Team Science may enable researchers to increase methodological rigor, systematically explore claims across a wider sample of languages, and to diversify both the languages studied and the researchers engaged. However, implementing Big Team Science practices is not without challenges, some of which are unique to the language sciences. We suggest strategies and best practices for adapting to these challenges, including theoretical and methodological pluralism, variation in conditions among data collection sites, and navigating a trade-off between maximizing methodological rigor and ability to engage with the most inclusive, typologically broad language samples.

This paper presents an acoustic study of Mundabli tones from original fieldwork data, specifically focusing on interactions of onset consonant type (voiceless obstruents, voiced obstruents, and sonorants) and f0 level and trajectory of tones. Our results reveal that voiceless obstruents condition an abrupt rise in f0 at vowel onset, while voiced obstruents and sonorants maintain similar, relatively steady f0 levels, providing evidence for an account of onset-f0 interaction in which only voiceless consonants condition f0 raising. In addition, we note that Mundabli's dense tonal inventory does not appear to constrain these interactions, as might be expected under accounts of speech production that relate within-category variation to the density of contrast in an inventory.

The current study explores whether Mandarin initial and medial voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops differ in their tongue positions and post-vocalic voicing during closure. Ultrasound tongue imaging and acoustic data from five Mandarin speakers revealed (1) no consistent pattern for tongue positions among speakers, and (2) no difference in degree of voicing during closure between the two stop series. These findings suggest that tongue position is not a reliable articulatory correlate for Mandarin laryngeal contrasts. This further suggests that aspiration is not correlated with tongue position differences, unlike the reported correlation between voicing and tongue root advancement.

Using electroglottography and acoustic measures, we characterize the strength and quality of voicing in voiced aspirated and unaspirated consonants (stops, fricatives, and approximants) in Yemba (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon). We show that the Yemba voiced aspirates exhibit mixed voicing: modal voicing during the consonant constriction, but voiceless aspiration after release. Breathy or whispery phonation extends slightly into consonant constrictions preceding, and across the entire duration of vowels following, aspiration; this non-modal phonation extends further into prenasalized consonants. Mixed voicing has typically been excluded from the possible range of laryngeal–supralaryngeal coordinative patterns in consonants, and is thought to be unattested in the world’s languages; most previous work on this topic assumes that non-modal phonation after voiced consonant release is breathy-voiced. However, we argue that Yemba voiced aspirates differ from more commonly studied breathy-release aspirates only in the settings of some gestural parameters: the late glottal spread gesture is larger in magnitude and more resistant to coarticulation, yielding consistently devoiced aspiration which may even be more perceptually recoverable compared to breathiness.

Suzhounese exhibits an unusual place anteriority contrast between rounded and unrounded dorso-palatal high front vowels, postalveolar fricative vowels, and apico-alveolar apical vowels. This arrangement is vulnerable to loss under intensifying contact with Standard Mandarin. Using acoustic and tongue ultrasound data, we investigated the phonetic implementation of place in the Suzhounese fricative and apical vowels and the similarity of place targets with the apico-alveolar and alveolo-palatal fricative consonants /s/ and /ɕ/, and the front vowel /i/. Two age cohorts differing in their acquisition history and usage of Standard Mandarin were investigated. The younger cohort, who had earlier and likely more intense exposure to Standard Mandarin, exhibited a subphonemic shift in the fricative vowels toward less anterior, more /i/-like constrictions. Due to this shift, implementation of place targets among vowels and consonants was less uniform for the younger cohort, particularly in acoustic terms, but articulatory target uniformity among the vowels at each place was robust for both cohorts regardless of the degree of shift. We discuss possible contact-based mechanisms for the observed changes, as well as implications of the observed interactions between L1–L2 transfer and L1-internal structural cohesion.