The acoustic characteristics of implosive and plosive bilabials in Shimaore

Implosive consonants have drawn the attention of researchers over time, partially due to their relative rarity in the world’s languages, and partially due to their unique ingressive air flow. This sound category has varying complex features from an articulatory and acoustic perspective. This study explores the sound category by analyzing the acoustic features of a language whose implosives have yet to be acoustically considered: Shimaore, a Bantu-Sabaki language spoken in Mayotte. Specifically, it compares the bilabial plosive /b/ and the bilabial implosive /ɓ/ in terms of Voice Onset Time (VOT), fundamental frequency, amplitude, and voice quality via H1*–H2*, harmonics-to-noise ratios (HNR), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). Analyses show that VOT is shorter for implosives than for plosives. At oral closure and vowel onset, amplitude and f0 are higher than plosives. H1*–H2* values read alongside HNR and CPP values suggest that implosives in Shimaore have glottal constriction. Some individual differences are explored for question of variation in implosives. Implications regarding sociophonetic studies in Mayotte as well as general implications for implosives are discussed.