ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

Stop production in Dhuwaya: Implications for literacy teaching

Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, Kathleen Jepson

The Dhuwaya language has a stop inventory with a rich set of place contrasts, and a very limited ‘strength’ contrast that is only found intervocalically in retroflex and (marginally) alveolar stops. The Dhuwaya orthography is overall quite transparent, but the orthography is inherited from a related language with a less limited ‘strength’ contrast, and for this reason there are 12 stop graphemes but only seven or eight stop phonemes, which causes difficulty in early literacy acquisition. In this study, we provide a first pass at an acoustic description of the Dhuwaya stops, and shows that while the stop graphemes do not all signify distinctive phonemes, they are consistently phonetically cued: sounds written with <b d g> etc. have a short closure while sounds written with <p t k> have a long closure.