Pronunciation change in SENĆOŦEN: A acoustic study of /k, kw, kw’, q, q’, qw qw’/ across generations of speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents an acoustic study of /k, kw, kw’, q, q’, qw qw’/ in SENĆOŦEN, a dialect of North Straits Salish. The “K series”—as these sounds are collectively called—are of particular concern among speakers, the perception being that both the uvular ~ velar and the plain ~ ejective contrasts may be disappearing. To understand how these contrasts are currently being realized, 12 speakers (3 speakers x 4 generations) were recorded pronouncing 20 isolated words (7 consonants x 2–3 words). Based on auditory impression and preliminary acoustic analysis (PLACE: spectral composition of bursts/frication; formant transitions into adjacent vowels; VOICING: VOT; jitter; shimmer; amplitude rise time), the velar ~ uvular contrast is indeed less consistent among younger speakers than among their elders; there is also a lot of variability in the plain ~ ejective contrast, among all speakers. In addition, the plain ~ ejective contrast interacts with the velar ~ uvular contrast for some speakers: /k kw/ and /q qw/ are merged and relatively fronted ([k kw]); /kw’/ and /qw’/ are merged and relatively backed ([qw’]). These realizations likely reflect a combination articulatory/aerodynamic considerations and orthographic influences (e.g., /kw’/ = ‘Q’; /qw/ = ‘Ḱ’).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".