Spectrographic Characteristics of Turkish /h/

Abstract

/h/ is described differently by different researchers. While some argue that /h/ is a glottal fricative, others argue that it is the voiceless counterpart of the following vowel, yet others argue that /h/ is a glide or an approximant. However, de- tailed acoustic studies focusing on /h/ are very limited. This study aims to describe the spectrographic characteristics of /h/ in Turkish. Test words consisted of 48 monosyllabic and disyllabic words containing /h/ which was followed by eight Turkish vowels. Totally 1440 tokens were analyzed. After segmentation, /h/ was classified based on its spectro- graphic characteristics: 1) segment exhibiting formants, 2) segment exhibiting frication (but no formants) with energy in lower frequencies and 3) segment exhibiting almost no energy. In order to find out if there is a significant difference among these three categories, Chi-square test was applied. The spectrographic characteristics of /h/ in Turkish suggest that it is more like the voiceless version of the surrounding vowels, significantly when it is in syllable initial position and the preceding vowel when in syllable final position.