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ief glottalic ingressive mechanism, and overlaid by a velaric ingressive mechanism.
These stops were partly voiced. Thus, in some languages, labial-velar stops do have an
implosive element. It is worth examining the acoustic properties of labial-velars in Mono
to establish if there is evidence of an implosive aspect to these sounds.
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Figure 8.22 shows a waveform of the word (C> (C> (C> (C> ‘to receive, to find’. If we look
at the period of closure, we see that the amplitude is level through the first half of closure,
and then there is a gradual drop in amplitude toward the end of the closure. As we saw in
the last section, the main characteristic of an implosive is a gradual increase in the signal
amplitude during the latter half to two-thirds of closure. Thus, the labial-velar stops do
not exhibit the primary acoustic property which characterizes implosive stops in Mono.
Figure 8.22: Waveform and spectrogram of the word (C> (C> (C> (C> ‘to receive, to find’
(Speaker K).
The labial-velar stops in Ladefoged (1968) which had a glottalic ingressive
component to their airstream mechanism exhibited a brief increase in signal amplitude
just before release (cf. Ladefoged’s plate 3a). In Figure 8.22, this pre-release increase is