Gujarati and White Hmong are among a small handful of languages known to maintain a phonemic contrast between breathy and modal voice across both obstruents and vowels. Given that breathiness on stop consonants is realized as a breathy-voiced aspirated release into the following vowel, how is consonant breathiness distinguished from vocalic breathiness, if at all? We examine acoustic and electroglottographic data of potentially ambiguous CV sequences collected from speakers of Gujarati and White Hmong, to determine what properties reliably distinguish breathiness associated with stop consonants from breathiness associated with vowels comparing both within and across these two unrelated languages. Results from the two languages are strikingly similar: only the early timing and increased magnitude of the various acoustic reflexes of breathiness phonetically distinguish phonemic consonantal breathiness from phonemic vocalic breathiness.

The three-way laryngeal distinction among voiceless Korean stops has been well documented for the Seoul dialect. The present study compares the acoustic and aerodynamic properties of this stop series between two dialects, non-tonal Seoul and tonal South Kyungsang Korean. Sixteen male Korean speakers (eight from Seoul and eight from Kyungsang) participated. Measures collected included VOT, f0 at vowel onset, H1-H2, and air pressure and airflow. The presence versus absence of lexical pitch accent affects both the acoustic and aerodynamic properties. First, Seoul speakers use a combination of f0 and VOT to distinguish the three-way contrast of Korean stops, while Kyungsang speakers mainly use VOT. Second, the presence of lexical pitch for Kyungsang speakers makes f0 an unreliable acoustic cue for the three Korean stops. Third, dialectal differences in VOT to mark the three-way distinction support the notion of a diachronic transition whereby VOT differences between the lenis and aspirated stops in Seoul Korean have been decreasing over the past 50 years. Finally, the aerodynamic results make it possible to postulate the articulatory state of the glottis, indicating a positive correlation with acoustic parameters. Based on the acoustic and aerodynamic results, phonological representations of Korean stops for the tonal and non-tonal dialects are suggested.

Palatalization contrasts are subject to certain asymmetries across languages (Takatori 1997, Kochetov 2002). For example, they are preferred at the beginning of words or syllables rather than at the end, and they are preferred in coronals rather than labials. Kochetov (2002, 2004) argues that these asymmetries are perceptually motivated, and he provides supporting evidence from Russian. We report on results of an acoustic and perceptual study of palatalization in Connemara Irish. Our acoustic analysis documents a range of properties distinguishing palatalized from non-palatalized consonants in Irish, though our acoustic data come from only one speaker. Based on a speeded AX discrimination task, our perceptual results in some ways parallel Kochetov's for Russian (listeners show degraded performance for the coda contrast compared to the onset contrast), and in some ways do not (they do not perform better on coronals than on labials).

According to the Degree of Articulatory Constraint model of lingual coarticulation, the consonant /s/ has some scope for tongue adaptation to neighbouring vowels, since the tongue dorsum is not directly involved in constriction formation for this consonant. The present study aimed to establish whether the tongue shape for /s/ in consonant–vowel syllables was influenced by the nature of the following vowel, in Scottish-English–speaking children and adults. Ultrasound tongue imaging was used to establish the presence or otherwise of a vowel effect at the consonant midpoint, by measuring differences between the consonant tongue contours in different vowel environments. In adults, the vowel pairs /a/–/i/, /a/–/u/ and /i/–/u/ exerted significant coarticulatory effects on /s/. In children, no significant effects on /s/ were observed. Greater within-speaker variability in lingual articulation was found in children than in adults. The reduced ability of children to anticipate the tongue configuration of a following vowel whilst simultaneously implementing an initial /s/ sound could be explained by lesser differential control of tip/blade and tongue body.

The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamese spoken in the eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a North-Eastern state of India, therefore Assamese and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (see Ethnologue, Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the Eastern district of Sibsagar and later in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in the year 1846 published a monthly periodical Arunodoi using the variety spoken in and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam (which roughly comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like /ɹ/ deletion, which is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent times.

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK, claim Czech heritage (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic 2009). However, it is not known how many of them are native speakers of Czech.

Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States – from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of Northern Paiute. In this illustration, we describe the language's Mono Lake variety.

In June 2011, the IPA Council received a formal request from William Barry and Jürgen Trouvain to vote on the adoption of a standard IPA symbol for the central open (unrounded) vowel. This request followed publication in 2008, in JIPA 38(3), of their paper ‘Do we need a symbol for a central open vowel?’, along with response papers in JIPA 39(2) by Daniel Recasens and Martin Ball, and a further response from Barry and Trouvain, in JIPA 39(3).

Wiktor Jassem's short article on rhythm (‘Indication of speech rhythm in the transcription of educated Southern English’) was published in 1949 in Le Maître Phonétique, the ancestor of today's Journal of the International Phonetic Association. The author was a young man aged 27 at the time, who was working on a longer treatment of the intonation of conversational English which was to be published three years later (Jassem 1952), just 60 years ago this year. Despite his youth, and despite the fact that he was not a native speaker of English, Jassem did not hesitate to take on giants, and to suggest in this paper that his treatment of rhythm is superior to that of both Henry Sweet and Harold Palmer, as well, he adds in the 1952 book, as that of his mentor Daniel Jones.

Susan Guion Anderson (née Susan G. Guion) died just shy of her 45th birthday on 24th December 2011 in Springfield, Oregon, from an aggressive and rare form of cancer. Her early death cut short a very productive research career in second language phonetics, and deprived students of an extremely gifted teacher.

Johan Liljencrants was a KTH oldtimer. His interests focused early on speech analysis and synthesis where in the 1960s he took a leading part in the development of analysis hardware, the OVE III speech synthesizer, and the introduction of computers in the Speech Transmission Laboratory. Later work shifted toward general speech signal processing, for instance in his thesis on the use of a reflection line synthesizer. His interests expanded to modelling the glottal system, parametrically as in the Liljencrants–Fant (LF) model of glottal waveshapes, as well as physically including glottal aerodynamics and mechanics.