Aerodynamics of Sakata labial-velar oral stops

The present contribution represents the first in-detail exploratory account of the aerodynamics of labial-velar oral stops in Sakata, a Bantu dialect cluster of southwestern Congo. Data collection took place at the phonetics laboratory facilities of Université de Mons with three speakers of central Sakata. Comparative data of labial-velar and plain bilabial oral stops are presented and analysed. Descriptive statistics of the relevant variables are discussed. Given each group of variables, MANOVA results are presented for specially tailored subsets of the whole dataset to investigate variance in the corpus. Sakata labial-velar stops are shown to differ from plain bilabials for duration, airflow, and pressure patterns. Voiceless labial-velar stops exhibit pressure and airflow values consistent with a more prominent lowering of the tongue root / larynx than their voiced counter- parts. Matches and mismatches with the available typological literature are also delineated and discussed.