An increasingly wide variety of imaging and tracking technologies have been applied to measuring speech articulation in recent years. However, virtually all of these techniques have been restricted to laboratory or clinical settings. Portable ultrasound technology offers a way to conduct easy, non-invasive dynamic imaging of the whole tongue for less commonly studied languages, both in the field and in the laboratory.

The intonational typology of two Northern Australian languages, Dalabon and the Kundedjnjenghmi dialect of Bininj Gun-wok, suggests that these languages can be analyzed within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonation as having two kinds of intonational events that serve to demarcate the boundaries of intonational phrases: pitch accents and boundary tones. Both languages have also previously been described as having lexical stress. In this study, the acoustic correlates of syllables associated with intonational pitch accents, were measured, namely, F0, duration, RMS amplitude and vowel quality, in one lengthy narrative text from each language. The duration of intonational phrase-final syllables was also measured. Results indicate that syllables associated with pitch accents are phonetically lengthened and have marginally higher RMS amplitude. However, there is little variation in vowel quality due to the presence of a pitch accent or intonational prominence. Final syllables are also lengthened at intonational phrase edges, indicating that duration is a cue to this level of prosodic constituency in these languages.

Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their co-articulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interlanguage variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

Words in fluent speech frequently differ from their citation forms. This paper investigates some factors influencing the realization of the preposition for and the number four. Realizations of these words in read and spontaneous speech show that instead of viewing function words as having discrete weak, strong, or even intermediate allomorphs, a continuum resulting from gestural interaction better represents the facts. In the speech examined here, numerous factors influence different aspects of the realization of for and four. The duration of the onset /f/ is affected by the preceding prosodic boundary while the duration and composition of the rime is affected by foot structure and segmental content. The preposition exhibits extreme reduction possibilities not seen in the number. In even this small set of studies, the read and spontaneous speech highlight different generalizations, pointing out the need to examine both kinds of speech. While this paper cannot locate all factors responsible for the variation in these words, it begins to unravel some of them and their effects on different portions of function words.

This study compares two diphthongs ([ea], [oa]) and two glide-vowel sequences ([ja], [wa]) in Romanian. The diphthongs and the sequences are auditorily very similar, but they differ in their phonological patterning. An integrated production and perception experiment is conducted in search of perceptual and acoustic evidence for the different phonological representations proposed for the diphthongs and the sequences. Four acoustic parameters of the diphthongs and sequences are measured and compared in a production study. In addition, a perception experiment tests native speakers' ability to correctly identify the two types of vocalic sequences. The results support the different representations proposed for [ea] vs. [ja], but not necessarily for [oa] vs. [wa]. This asymmetry is interpreted in the context of language-specific frequency differences, and of contrast maintenance. The study shows that detailed phonetic description is needed for a complete understanding of the phonological facts.

Friulian is spoken by over 700,000 people in the far northeastern Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a noticeably conservative area which borders Austria in the north, Slovenia in the east, the Adriatic sea in the south and the Veneto region in the west. The Friulian varieties are sufficiently well-differentiated from adjacent dialects of the Romance group, especially from the Venetian ones. Some varieties of the Venetian type are also spoken within the boundaries of the administrative region Friuli Venezia-Giulia, in the east (including Trieste), in the west and in several areas in the extreme south. A Friulian-Venetian diglossia is widespread in the main towns of the region, being a result of both historical (prestige of Venetian institutions during the centuries of the Serenissima's supremacy) and social circumstances (recent immigration from the neighbouring Veneto). On the other hand, Friulian is also spoken outside Friuli, in the district of Portogruaro (today part of the Veneto region), along the Friulian border (coinciding with the Tagliamento river), as well as outside Italy (especially in Australia, the Americas and South Africa), as a result of emigration. Some groups of Friulian speakers are still found in Rumania (Iliescu 1972).

Nara is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by some 41,000 people to the north-west of Barentu in northern Eritrea. It is now regarded as constituting a one-language branch of the East Sudanic family (Bender 1989: 20; though see Ehret 1989: 49) but formerly it had been treated as an isolate within the phylum. The fullest description of the language in existence is that of Reinisch (1874) though in that work, the language name is given as ‘Barea’, which is an unfortunate choice since it is the word for ‘slave’ in a number of Ethiopian Semitic languages; Nara is the term used by the speech community for referring to their language as well as to themselves. Four distinct dialects need to be recognized within Nara, namely: Higir, Mogorayeb, Koyta and Saantoorta.