88 realization of one language’s vowel phonemes to that of another. For these reasons, I
describe the basic acoustic correlates of Ikoma’s seven vowel phonemes. These measures are also useful in later sections of the thesis in which further measurements are done in
order to better describe vowel harmony alternations. After reviewing the methodology of this analysis in §3.5.1, in §3.5.2 I give
formant measurements of vowels in both nouns and verbs, based on a the speech of one speaker. §3.5.3 extends the analysis to three additional speakers, though here I deal with
verbs only. §3.5.4 discusses the correlation between bandwidth and [ATR], showing evidence that the measurement of the first formant bandwidth could be a good acoustic
correlate of the ATR contrast in Ikoma.
3.5.1 Methodology
In §1.6 I give an overview of the methodology I have used for acoustic phonetic research. In this section, I provide more specific criteria which I used for choosing and recording a
wordlist which was specifically designed to discover the nature of the seven vowel phonemes in their most basic and “pure” environments. In order to establish this baseline
for the seven vowels, I chose a wordlist of 77 items to record, made up of 35 verbs five verbs per vowel and 42 nouns six nouns per vowel. I limited the words to those
containing only short vowels whenever possible, but in the end I needed to include two verbs with phonemic long vowels ko- oosa ‘to hoe’ and ko- eeka ‘to wear’. I have not
detected any difference between the vowel qualities of corresponding short and long vowels.
For verbs, I chose five infinitive verbs with a canonical CVCa stem. As discussed in §3.1 above, each of the seven vowels occurs in this position. I avoided nasals and any
89 sort of clusters such as palatalized or labialized consonants, with the exception of the
verb ko- jeka ‘to bury.’ Otherwise, a variety of consonants were used. The infinitive form was used primarily because it is the citation form for verbs. It is also helpful because the
infinitive prefix vowel alternations from o to u provide significant clues for the harmony system and are useful for prefix vowel measurements, which are discussed in
Chapter 5. Also, by consistently limiting the final vowel to a, I avoid any possible influence on the root vowel made by other final vowels.
For nouns, for each of the seven vowels I chose six canonical nouns with bisyllabic CVCV roots. In all of these words, both root vowels are identical, which
should prevent any assimilatory effects from one vowel to another. The primary purpose of this list is to investigate vowels in the initial syllable of the root, but I also had to make
decisions about noun classes and noun class prefixes, since prefix alternations are also a major point of inquiry. Out of necessity, I used nouns from a wide variety of noun
classes. For recording, the list was divided into nouns and verbs and then broken down
into smaller sections of approximately ten to fifteen words each. Each section was then randomized so that, for example, the nouns with CiCi stems were not all together, but
were mixed in with CoCo, CaCa, etc., stems. For nouns, speakers pronounced two repetitions of the singular form followed by two repetitions of the plural form. For verbs,
they pronounced three repetitions of the infinitive.
3.5.2 Vowels in both nouns and verbs Speaker B
