Reconceptualizing VOT: Further contributions to marking 50 years of research on voice onset time

Abstract

Most work using voice onset time (VOT) to characterize voicing contrasts has focused on languages with two or three-way distinctions (Lisker and Abramson, 1964, Cho et al., 2019b). While this work acknowledges that VOT is not adequate to describe more complex voicing contrasts, there are few proposals addressing how such complex laryngeal contrasts can be characterized. In this post-facto addition to the special collection Marking 50 Years of Research on Voice Onset Time and the Voicing Contrast in the World’s Languages (Cho, Docherty, & Whalen, 2019a), I argue that VOT should be reconceptualized as a two-dimensional plane rather than a one-dimensional continuum. This simple reformulation of VOT, under which negative and positive VOT make up the complete VOT space, yields a more complete description of the voicing contrasts that exist in the world’s languages. Crucial evidence comes from Bengali which, like many other Indic languages, has a four-way contrast, utilizing both voicing and aspiration. If VOT is conceptualized as two-dimensional, the Bengali-type pattern is naturally predicted to exist. I argue that two-dimensional VOT best characterizes the acoustic properties of voicing contrasts and that the modest modification to our understanding of the VOT space proposed here can better explain the typology of stop laryngeal contrasts.