Acoustic Account of “R” in Turkish

In languages, [r] with different manner of articulations (trill, flap, fricative, approximant) has occurred in different positions (alveolar, retroflex, velar). On the other hand, in different languages, the nature of the apical trill [r] in particular, has a great amount of variability in different phonetic contexts and may be affected and changed easily by the surrounding sounds. However, Formants’ frequencies, fundamental frequency, intensity and duration are those acoustic parameters analyzed and measured for Turkish [r] in this article. The data collected in this study show that [r] phoneme has various realizations according environment. It is realized differently depending on its position within a word. As an instance, the [r] in before and after voiced consonants, and in the intervocalic positions is approximant sound and in contrast, the manner of articulation of word-final [r] is voiceless alveolar fricative. The [r] in after and before voiceless consonants is voiced alveolar fricative. The word-initial [r] is also approximant.



1. Introduction

Turkish language is mainly spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran (Johanson, 2010). After Farsi as the official language, Turkish, with approximately 15–20 million speakers, has the most speakers in Iran (Crystal, 2010). Most of the speakers inhabit in the four provinces of the northwestern part of Iran. In the literature two striking features of Turkic morphology was presented: first, its agglutinative nature (low level of fusion, in Sapir's terminology), i.e. the fact that there is basically one-one correspondence between grammatical categories and their exponents, and second, its highly synthetic nature (high level of synthesis, again using Sapir's terminology), i.e. the fact that a given word can contain a large number of morphemes. Furthermore, the syllable structure of Turkish is consonant-vowel-consonant (consonant). That is, tautosyllabic consonant clusters with the sonority drop are acceptable. In Turkic languages, stress falls into final syllables of all parts of speech (noun, adjectives, adverbs, verbs), most of the derivational and inflectional suffixes carry stress.

Research Questions

The main research question of this study can be formulated as follows:

(1) What is the manner of articulation of [r] in Azeri Turkish language? (2) What is the first, second and third formant structures of [r]?



2. Literature Review

The theoretical framework of this study follows Behrman (2007) and Ladefoged (2006) acoustic studies on the English language [r] that underlines the reduction of F3. In other words, F3 suffers a severe drop in [r] production, that is, it reaches a level lower than 2000 Hz and approaches F2.



3. Methodology

In the study on formant measurements of [r], analysis revealed no significant effect of gender on the variables (stress pattern and syllable position), so the formant values of the male and female participants were pooled and reported one average value of F1, F2 and F3 for [r]. Formant frequency analysis was performed in Praat with its default standard settings (range of 5,000 Hz for five formants). Descriptive statistics were performed to describe mean and standard deviation values for output measures (F1, F2, F3). In this research, participants were recruited from among Turkish speakers aged 20-45 years old. There were 15 subjects including male and female. We had 480 target words for analysis. Participants were asked to read the list of carrier phrases two times.



4. Results

The results revealed that, the Turkish [r] sound has different allophones, two of which are actually trills, they are called voiced alveolar trill and voiceless alveolar trill. The latter occurs at the end of words while the former occurs at everywhere except between vowels, where [r] is a simple voiced alveolar tap. The analysis of F1 and F2 of approximant allophone showed that these formants are changed under the influences of surrounding vowels or consonants. Another important finding was that F3 suffers a severe drop in [r] production, that is, it reaches a level lower than 2000 Hz and approaches F2.