Previous studies of the Arabic pharyngeal ‘ayn have reported stop, fricative and approximant realisations within and across dialects. This paper presents an approximant variant that has not been specifically identified before. Described as a ‘tight approximant’, it is characterised acoustically by a pattern of filtering in which the lowest half dozen or so harmonics, including the fundamental, are markedly reduced in amplitude. Auditory responses to this kind of spectrum are characterised in terms of residue pitch. The variant can be thought of as compressed or ‘squeezed’ in the articulatory, acoustic and auditory domains in a chain of phonetic cause and effect. Laryngopharyngeal tension creates a low F0 and a compressed bandpass-filtered spectrum, which is processed auditorily by adjacent harmonics being squeezed through the same auditory filter. Acoustic and laryngographic data from selected tokens of a corpus of 436 realisations of ‘ayn, produced by 21 speakers from 11 different North African and Middle Eastern countries, are presented in support of the description of this variant. Its frequency of occurrence in the corpus suggests it is a common variant in Arabic speech. Some suggestions concerning the diachrony of ‘ayn are made in light of the reported observations.

This paper examines the acoustic characteristics of the Cibaeño Dominican Spanish ‘pre-aspirated’ trill. The data are based on narrative speech of ten native speakers from the Cibao region. The findings reveal that the segment is most often produced as a period of pre-breathy voice followed by a single tap, [hr]. The second most frequently occurring production involves pre-breathy voice and a trill. The term pre-breathy-voiced vibrant is proposed as a more appropriate characterization of the Cibaeño Dominican Spanish trill.

Komi-Permyak (Finno-Ugric) has a typologically rare contrast between palatal stops and palatal affricates; the latter are also contrastive with postalveolar affricates. In addition, the language has a relatively uncommon three-way place contrast among sibilant fricatives. This paper investigates acoustic properties of the Komi-Permyak voiceless coronal obstruents in different positional contexts. An acoustic analysis of data from six native speakers of the language revealed that the contrasts were well differentiated by a combination of duration, noise intensity, spectral shapes, and vowel transitions – consistently with previous studies of similar consonants in other languages. The results also showed some positional differences in the realization of the consonants. Overall, the study contributes to a better understanding of phonetic implementation of marked phonological contrasts and positional variation; it also provides an acoustic record of the endangered language.

Beginning phonetics students are taught that some varieties of American English have two contrasting reduced vowels, transcribed as [e] and [i], illustrated by the unstressed vowels in the minimal pair Rosa's vs. roses (e.g. Ladefoged 2001, 2005). However, little seems to be known about the precise nature or distribution of these vowels. This study explores these questions through acoustic analysis of reduced vowels in the speech of nine American English speakers. The results show that there is a fundamental distinction between the mid central [e] vowel that can occur in unstressed word-final position (e.g. in Rosa), and high reduced vowels that occur in most other unstressed positions, and might be transcribed as [i]. The contrast between pairs like Rosa's and roses derives from this difference because the word-final [e] is preserved when an inflectional suffix is added, so the schwa of Rosa's is similar to the final vowel of Rosa, whereas the unstressed vowel of roses is the high [i] reduced vowel quality found elsewhere. So the standard transcription of the reduced vowel contrast is justified, but the widespread use of [e] to transcribe word-internal reduced vowels is misleading – mid reduced vowels are generally only found in stem-final position.

In this illustration, we present a transcription and discussion of the variety of English spoken by people of European descent in New Zealand. Locally, such people are referred to as being Pākehā, using the Māori word. Pākehā speech is illustrated here in the speech of three educated women. Thus some of the features which might be expected from New Zealanders do not occur in these recordings, although the speakers are all clearly New Zealanders.

Chistabino is the variety of Aragonese, a Romance dialect descended from Latin, like Spanish, still spoken in the Valley of Gistau, bordering on France and formed by the River Cinqueta, in the central part of the Spanish Pyrenees (Province of Huesca). Although it is spoken mainly in the village of Gistaín (c. 240 inhabitants; c. 1400 m above sea-level, near latitude 42°35′), and is fairly well preserved by the older generations there, fluent speakers can still be found also in the nearby locality of San Juan. The other inhabited villages in the valley (Plan, Serveto, Sin and Saravillo) have suffered much greater degrees of erosion by Castilian (Standard Spanish), which has increased its influence through much improved communications, leading to the development of tourism in the area and emigration by the young in search of greater prosperity. The remaining village, Señes, has been uninhabited since 1970.