Analyzing formant trajectories of Akuzipik vowels

Akuzipik, or St. Lawrence Island Yupik, is an endangered Alaska Native language spoken fluently by approximately 540 people, primarily on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Previous work on Akuzipik used point measurements of formants to investigate the vowel inventory. In the present study, we are examining formant trajectories and vowel inherent spectral change to identify the temporal patterns of the acoustics. Six Akuzipik speakers were previously recorded for vowel analysis as part of a larger documentation and revitalization project. Speakers read the carrier sentence aghnat X atiimaat [aʁnat X atiːmaːt] “the women said X,” where X is a word starting with one of the seven target vowels. The stimuli had been selected so that there were eight unique words for each vowel. Each word began as VC, with V being the target vowel and C being equally balanced between labial, coronal, velar, and uvular obstruents. Vowels were manually annotated in Praat. The formant trajectories will be analyzed using generalized additive mixed modeling, with particular attention paid to verifying the putative vowel qualities and lengths. The results of this study will scaffold further work on the phonetics of Akuzipik and related revitalization work.