Vowel acoustics of Nungon, Papua New Guinea

![CDATA[Most reference grammars relegate vowel acoustics to minor sections, at best. Likewise, a corpus assembled to support grammatical description may lack high-quality recordings targeting vowels in all environments. Recent studies have applied multi-point acoustic-phonetic analyses for under-described languages. But these studies use corpora that were purpose-built for acoustic analysis. The present study applies state-of-the-art acoustic analysis techniques to a more general language documentation corpus. We present a preliminary comprehensive acoustic description of the vowels /i e a u o ɔ/ in the Towet dialect of the Papuan language Nungon. Duration, fundamental frequency and formant measurements (F1, F2 and F3) of the six phonological vowels in word-initial, -medial, and -final contexts were obtained. Results are compared with the description of phonetics and phonology in the Nungon reference grammar. In particular, the reference grammar’s claim of a mid-back vowel /o/ with exceptionally low F2 values is evaluated.]]