The second formants of the laterals in Turkish

Abstract

The study shows that there are two distinct lateral phonemes in Turkish with a minimal pair example. 20 male native speakers of Turkish, aged 20-26, were asked to read six short phrases and a minimal pair which contained laterals. The spectrograms were examined by PRAAT to determine whether it is possible to identify the laterals with regard to their second formants. As the laterals could have been greatly affected by the formants of the surrounding sounds, they were detected by following acoustic cues and the F₂ values were gathered at 50ms of these sounds, which minimized the impact of the other sounds. The non-velarized lateral /l/ is marked by a higher F₂ than the velarized lateral /ɫ̪/ because of a tongue raising gesture. In order to distinguish between the two laterals, the Mann-Whitney U test was employed based on their F₂ values in the minimal pair example, for α = 0.01. With reference to the data, it appears that there is a statistically significant difference between the F₂ values of the laterals (p < 0.01). There is strong evidence that second formants help define the laterals in Turkish.