Articulatory-acoustic characteristics of the Baraba-Tatar phoneme a/(sic)/in a comparative aspect

The paper considers the articulatory-acoustic characteristics of the Baraba-Tatar phoneme a/(sic)/ In the course of the MRI investigation, the representations of this phoneme turned out to be pharyngealized, thus putting Barabian in line with other Siberian Turkic languages, such as Tuba, Tuvan, etc. Moreover, the labialization of sound a tuning appears in the very beginning of a wordform, a phenomenon that is more typical for Volga-Tatar and Bashkir. The acoustic analysis, made in SpeechAnalyzer and PRAAT programs, showed that in spite of some minor disagreements between the computer data, the results tend to be in good correspondence with each other. Thus, the phoneme a/(sic)/ can be characterized as short, with the exception in the position between noise guttural and less-noise vibrant where all realizations are within 100 and 150 % of the average sound length. All allophones of the phoneme a/(sic)/ proved to be central-back, with this fact confirmed by both articulatory and acoustic data. The present investigation is just the first step of a complex experimental-phonetic study of the Baraba-Tatar vocal system, and further work is needed to reveal the articulatory-acoustic peculiarities of the Barabian vocalism.