Aspirated voiceless stops and phonation

Preliminary acoustic observations

Abstract

This paper investigates the phonation of the vowel /a/ when preceded by a voiceless aspirated stop in the Regional Italian from central Calabria. The results showed that variation in Voice Onset Time duration has a strong correlation with the phonation of the following vowel. The findings showed that, after a voiceless aspirated stop, the onset of the vowel is realized with higher values of Open Quotient (OQ) and Spectral Tilt, suggesting that the phonation type is different from a vowel after a voiceless short-lag VOT stop.