title: 'Fortis/lenis' revisited one more time: the aerodynamics of some oral stop contrasts in three continents.
abstract: The terms fortis and lenis are variously regarded as having one single underlying phonetic correlate or many. An exploratory analysis of acoustic and aerodynamic data on contrasting stop series in a number of European and non-European languages confirms that a significant variation in peak intra-oral pressure and in articulatory stricture duration are two of the main factors differentiating these series. Two central questions are: (1) Is the contrast in peak pressure controlled by lung volume decrement or by the degree of glottal aperture? (2) Is the gesture for the lenis sound a truncated or a re-scaled version of the gesture for the fortis sound? A more detailed examination of the data from the non-European languages suggests that glottal aperture, rather than respiratory effort is the main physiological parameter underlying the pressure variation, and that each member of the opposition has a specific target peak pressure, rather than the lenis peak pressure being truncated by the early release of the articulatory closure.
authors.affiliation: Human Communication Research Group, Flinders Institute for Health and Medical Research, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. andy.butcher@flinders.edu.au
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Butcher
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010699:Phonation / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D012123:Pulmonary Ventilation; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology