Yeyi Clicks: Acoustic Description and Analysis

Yeyi has the largest known inventory of click sounds in the Bantu language family. It is now entering a moribund state, and this paper documents a variety of acoustic and distributional details of the clicks found in the speech of 13 Yeyi speakers by presenting sound inventories, spectrograms, palatograms, and related acoustic data. The durations of the closure and release phases of the clicks were measured, and an analysis demonstrates that the two duration measures together are statistically able to distinguish the dental, alveolar, palatal, and lateral clicks from one another. A second quantitative study examines the discriminability of the four click places using solely the anterior burst power spectra, as parametrized using the first four spectral moments. The places of articulation are found to be moderately well classified by this means. The patterns of interspeaker variation affecting the clicks are also documented, and these are found to accord rather well with the classification errors made by the optimal classifier using the anterior burst spectra.