Jeff Mielke - "Phonetic studies of typologically unusual vowel systems"

Jeff Mielke is a professor at North Carolina State University in the Linguistics Program, Department of English. He received his PhD in linguistics at the Ohio State University in 2004, working with Elizabeth Hume. From 2004 to 2006, he was a postdoc in the Arizona Phonological Imaging Laboratory (APIL), directed by Diana Archangeli.  From 2006 to 2012 he worked as an assistant and then associate professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Ottawa, before joining the linguistics program in the English department at NCSU in the fall of 2012. He studies linguistic sound patterns using laboratory and computational techniques.

Abstract: I report acoustic and articulatory studies of two endangered languages with typologically unusual vowel systems. Bora, a Witotoan language spoken in Peru and Colombia, has been described as having a three-way backness contrast between unrounded high vowels /i ɨ ɯ/. An audio-video investigation of Bora vowels reveals that while none of these vowels are produced with lip rounding, the vowel described as /ɨ/ is actually a front vowel with extreme lingual-dental contact. This appears to be a previously unknown vowel type. Kalasha, a Dardic language spoken in Pakistan, has been described as having 20 vowel phonemes: plain /i e a o u/, nasalized /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/, retroflex /i˞ e˞ a˞ o˞ u˞/, and retroflex nasalized /ĩ˞ ẽ˞ ã˞ õ˞ ũ˞/. An ultrasound study of Kalasha vowels shows that the vowels described as retroflex are produced not with retroflexion but with various combinations of tongue bunching and other tongue shape differences, raising questions about if and how these phonetic dimensions should be integrated with notions of basic vowel quality. I discuss implications of the Bora and Kalasha data for models of vowel features.