TITLE:
Spectrographic Characteristics of Turkish /h/
AUTHORS:
Esra Ertan
KEYWORDS:
Spectrographic Analysis; Glottal Fricative; Turkish /h/
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Acoustics,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
9,
2013
ABSTRACT: /h/ is described differently by different researchers. While some
argue that /h/ is a glottal fricative, others argue that it is the voiceless
counterpart of the following vowel, yet others argue that /h/ is a glide or an
approximant. However, de- tailed acoustic studies focusing on /h/ are
very limited. This study aims to describe the spectrographic characteristics of
/h/ in Turkish. Test words consisted of 48 monosyllabic and disyllabic words
containing /h/ which was followed by eight Turkish vowels. Totally 1440 tokens
were analyzed. After segmentation, /h/ was classified based on its spectrographic
characteristics: 1) segment exhibiting formants, 2) segment exhibiting
frication (but no formants) with
energy in lower frequencies and 3) segment exhibiting almost no energy. In order to find out if there is a
significant difference among these three categories, Chi-square test
was applied. The spectrographic characteristics of /h/ in Turkish suggest that
it is more like the voiceless version of the surrounding vowels, significantly
when it is in syllable initial position and the preceding vowel when in
syllable final position.