Tonal Dialects and Consonant-Pitch Interaction in Yucatec Maya 29

3 Description of the Vowel System

3.1 Vowel Length

In Table 4 we see the average vowel lengths for the four vowel shapes. It is clear from this table that the HIGH TONE, LOW TONE, and GLOTTALIZEDvowels are all long vowels, each almost twice as long as the SHORT vowel. All differences in vowel length between two vowel shapes are statistically significant (p < .0001) except GLOTTALIZED vowels vs. HIGH TONEvowels.6 Cross-linguistically, low tone tends to be associated with longer vowel duration than high tone, and contour tones tend to be associated with longer vowel duration than level tones (Gandour 1977). It is therefore interesting that both GLOTTALIZED and HIGH TONE vowels (those vowels that start with relatively high F0) are significantly longer than LOW TONEvowels. The lengths of these vowels in YM fit with the general pattern if we consider that they are indeed contour tonesstarting with high F0 and ending with low F0while the LOW TONE vowel is produced with level pitch.

Table II-4 Mean vowel length by vowel shape

vowel shape mean length (ms) standard deviationGLOTTALIZED 216 71.8HIGH TONE 212 73.0LOW TONE 198 77.0SHORT 113 51.7

Table II-5 Mean vowel length for nonce forms vs. existing forms

mean length (ms)vowel shape nonce form existing form t pGLOTTALIZED 256 203 9.3