The Kaytetye segmental inventory

ABSTRACT There are three phonological hypotheses on the Kaytetye segmental inventory. Hypothesis 1 proposes 30 segments: four monophthongs, one diphthong and 25 consonants. Hypothesis 2 proposes 54 segments: two monophthongs and 52 consonants. Hypothesis 3 proposes 55 segments: three monophthongs and 52 consonants. The choice between these three hypotheses has significant implications for models of phonological contrast, phonotactic organization, syllable structure and partial reduplication processes in Kaytetye. We evaluate the three hypotheses against evidence from these domains and find that Hypothesis 1 is the best supported phonological analysis. Companion analysis of the phonetic distribution and functional load of medial Kaytetye monophthong tokens was conducted by phonetically-trained transcribers, and compared with groupings of vowels obtained through unsupervised classification of first and second formant values using finite Gaussian mixture models. Both transcriber-perceived and machine-learnt categorizations agree that none of the four monophthongs are marginal, nor can their qualities be attributed to phonological context effects. These data demonstrate the importance of both phonological and phonetic evidence in evaluating the structure and properties of vowel systems in under-described languages.