Speech and Vision Lab

In this paper, a preliminary investigation of the acoustic charac- teristics of Amharic ejectives in comparison with their unvoiced conjugates is presented. The normalized error from linear pre- diction residual and a zero frequency resonator output are used to locate the instant of release of the oral closure and the instant of the start of voicing, respectively. Amharic ejectives are found to have longer closure duration and smaller VOT than their un- voiced conjugates. Cross-linguistic comparisons reveal that no ejectives of two languages behave acoustically in a similar man- ner despite similarity in their articulation.