Chapter II 28

word was printed on a note card. For an existing form, the card contained the target word in standard orthography in large print with the Spanish equivalent of the word in smaller print below. The Spanish translation was given because most participants had more reading experience with Spanish and in order to prevent orthographic misunderstandings. For example, a reader should be less likely to mistake kaan (with a GLOTTALIZED vowel) for kan (with HIGH TONE) if kaan is printed alongside fuerte strong (as opposed to kan hammock). With nonce forms, each card contained the target word in standard orthography in large print with an existing word containing the same vowel shape in smaller print below. This format was again designed to prevent misinterpretation.

There was a brief training and practice session before recording began. The participant reviewed the correlation between orthography and vowel shape and then read a few test note cards, containing both existing and nonce forms. The recording session was divided into two sections: existing forms were presented first, followed by a break during which the participant was asked if they had any questions, and then nonce forms were presented. Throughout the session, participants were encouraged to ask questions if necessary and to repeat the word as many times as they wished if they were not happy with the original pronunciation. In all, participation took about 20 minutes and participants were compensated for their time.

Recordings were made with an IBM laptop (running PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink 2006)) and a head-mounted microphone (Radio Shack product 33-3012) at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz. All measurements were extracted from the recordings using PRAAT. For each target word, the boundaries of the vowel were demarcated so that length could be calculated, and pitch values were extracted at 10 ms intervals for the duration of each vowel. Each vowel was coded for glottalization type. Vowels were produced with modal voice (no glottalization), creaky voice (during some portion of the vowel), or a full glottal stop. The coding of a vowel as one of these categories was based on observance of a spectrogram and waveform (see Gordon and Ladefoged 2001). full glottal stop was evidenced by a period of (relative) silence greater than 20 ms, while creaky voice was evidenced by widely spaced (and often irregularly spaced) pitch periods with relatively weak intensity (see Figure 1 for examples).