Sibilant consonant: Encyclopedia II - Sibilant consonant - Other definitions of sibilant

Sibilant consonant - Other definitions of sibilant

Some authors, as for instance Chomsky & Halle (1964), group [ f ] and [ v ] as sibilants. However, they do not have the grooved articulation and high frequencies of other sibilants, and most phoneticians (for instance by Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), continue to group them together with the bilabial fricatives [ ɸ, β ] as non-sibilant anterior fricatives. Some researchers judge [ f ] to be strident in one language, e.g. the African language Ewe, as determined by experimental measuerments of amplitude, but as non-strident in English.

The nature of sibilants as so-called 'obstacle fricatives' is complicated - there is a continuum of possibilities relating to the angle at which the jet of air may strike an obstacle. The grooving often considered necessary for classification as a sibilant has been observed in ultrasound studies of the tongue for supposedly non-sibilant [ θ ] voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative (Stone and Lundberg, 1996, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 99: 3728-3737). More research on the phonetic bases of the terms sibilance and stridency, and their interrelationship, is required.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Other definitions of sibilant", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki