Session info
LSA 2025 Saturday, January 11, 2025 Part 1: 1:45–3:15pm Part 2: 3:30–5:00pm

Session description
The use of phonetic, experimental, and laboratory methods to answer phonological questions has exploded in popularity since the 1987 founding of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. As applied to African languages, these sorts of approaches have until recently been used primarily in the pursuit of documentation and description, as opposed to exploration of questions of phonological structure, representation, and theory. In this session, we highlight recent work in this vein—bringing a "laboratory" framework to bear on questions of African phonology.
Descriptive phonetic studies of African languages have a long and rich history—for example, Clement Doke used X-ray photography in his pioneering 1923 study of the posterior constriction of Zulu clicks. Along similarly descriptive lines, acoustic analysis has been used to describe voicing quality in Xhosa clicks (Jessen and Roux 2002) and Kinyarwanda tone (Myers 2003); ultrasound has been employed in the study of N|uu click articulation (Miller et al 2009) and whistled fricatives in Xitsonga (Lee-Kim, Kawahara, and Lee 2014); and MRI has been used to study production of Khoekhoe clicks in real time (Proctor et al. 2016).
There is also a rich and longstanding tradition of African languages making significant contributions to phonological theory. For example, the Obligatory Contour Principle originated from analyses of Mende tone (Leben 1973, Goldsmith 1976). Hyman’s (1985) development of moraic theory is motivated chiefly by data from Idoma, Gokana, and Kpelle. Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) theory was proposed based on evidence from Yaka, Kikongo, Ngbaka, and Ethiopian Semitic languages (Walker 2000, Rose 2000).
Curiously, the intersection of these two bodies of work remained somewhat of a gap in the literature—until recently. Instrumental, quantitative, and experimental methods have highlighted a wide array of factors as relevant to phonological patterns, like frequency and neighborhood effects, fine-grained phonetic details, and so forth. While it has historically been difficult to rigorously examine some of these factors in under-resourced and under-studied African languages, more recent work has increasingly leveraged new technologies to tackle questions at this intersection of phonetics and phonology. For example, Walker et al. (2008) use EMA articulatory data to shed new light on transparency in sibilant harmony. Bennett and Braver (2015) use a wug-test paradigm to test the productivity of labial palatalization in Xhosa. Lionnet (2017) proposes a novel feature theory based on coarticulatory factors that only truly reveal themselves under serious acoustic analysis. These examples serve to show how key insights about phonological patterns may emerge only under the light of additional data of types not traditionally recorded in descriptive grammars.
This session aims to showcase current research that uses “lab” methods to document or quantify phonological patterns in African languages to add illustration to description. Our inspiration here is from the JIPA ‘Illustrations of the IPA’ series, but we see a benefit and necessity in illustrating phonological patterns using lines of data that may fall outside the scope of JIPA’s focus on phonetics.
Schedule and abstracts
(Schedule subject to change)
1:45–1:50 |
Introduction |
1:50–2:10 |
Acoustics and Aerodynamics of Nghlwa ImplosivesAlexandra Pfiffner, Lindsay Hatch, & Katherine R. Russell (UC Berkeley) |
2:10–2:30 |
Phonetic and phonological patterning of glottalized sonorants in LobiAmber Galvano, Sansan Claude Hien, and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) |
2:30–2:50 |
Non-dorsal vowels: phonetic and phonological evidence from African languagesMatthew Faytak (University at Buffalo) |
2:50–3:10 |
Pharyngealization in Two Varieties of ToussianTajudeen Mamadou Yacoubou (University of Michigan), Anthony Struthers-Young (UC San Diego) |
3:10–3:15 | Discussion |
3:15–3:30 | Break |
3:30–3:40 | Discussion |
3:40–4:00 |
The acoustic properties of implosives in Guébie (Kru)Madeleine Oakley and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) |
4:00–4:20 |
Click perception experiments in Xhosa and ZuluWill Bennett, Aaron Braver , Tyler Miller, Khethani Yende, Camilla Christie (Rhodes University and Texas Tech University) |
4:20–4:40 |
Acoustics and Phonology of Gbagyi TonesSamuel Akinbo & Abigail Dalhatu (University of Toronto) |
4:40–5:00 | Discussion |