The pitch realisations of the accentual systems in Osaka Japanese (OJ) and Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) have been auditorily described in detail, and analysed within various phonological frameworks. However, little linguistic-phonetic descriptive research has been undertaken on the accent types of Japanese dialects in such a way as to enable a cross-dialectal comparison of their acoustic realisation. In this study, linguistic-tonetic representations of OJ and KJ tonalities are derived from normalised acoustic representations for pitch patterns conventionally described as LH, LHL, LLH and LLLH. A comparison of these representations across the two dialects demonstrates some significant differences in the acoustic realisation of the H/L units. The implications of these observed differences for surface tonal representation of KJ within Autosegmental-Metrical theory are also explored.

Earlier studies on Standard Italian describe polar questions as being characterised by a terminal rise, as opposed to a terminal fall for statements, where a low/falling accentual movement precedes the terminal part of the contour in both sentence types. The same is generally claimed for the Northern and Central Italian varieties (including Florentine, i.e. the variety from which Standard Italian stems), whereas Southern accents are characterised by an accentual rise followed by a terminal fall, being therefore the primary cue for question in non-terminal position. However, a closer look at the existing literature on regional Italian question intonation reveals that such a geographical distribution of intonational features across Italian accents is not that clear-cut. A reason for this discrepancy might be the different speaking styles – here intended as the broad spontaneous vs. read distinction – of the spoken productions analysed. The aim of this paper is to call into question the claim that a terminal rise preceded by an accentual low/fall is the most widespread intonational feature for marking questioning across Italian accents. The goal is to provide a clearer picture of question intonation in Italian by looking at the distribution of the rise as either on terminal or non-terminal position across a large number of varieties, where speech materials have been elicited with the same methodology, and they are therefore homogeneous with respect to speaking style. Intonation analysis has been carried out on spontaneous yes–no questions extracted from the Map Task dialogues collected in the CLIPS national corpus (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto – Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian) covering 15 varieties of Italian. Results of this analysis on the Northern, Central, and Southern polar questions reveals that the accentual rise prevails, and that the distribution of the rise across varieties is independent of the geography.

In Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), [h + voiceless stop] clusters are realized as long pre- and postaspirated stops. This study investigates if a new class of stops (realized as geminates with variable degrees of pre- and postaspiration) has emerged in this dialect, or if postaspiration in these clusters results from articulatory overlap. An experiment was carried out in which WAS speakers produced [h + voiceless stop] clusters under changes in speech rate and stress location. The duration of postaspiration, measured as voice onset, did not show systematic effects of any of the experimental variables. Moreover, trade-offs were observed between voice onset and preaspiration plus closure durations. These results indicate that postaspiration in WAS [h + voiceless stop] clusters is the consequence of extensive articulatory overlap. It is further hypothesized that the lengthening of closures in WAS stops preceded by [h] results from a different gestural mechanism affecting all [hC] clusters in this dialect. From a broader perspective, since extensive overlap and consonantal lengthening do not occur in the [hC] clusters of other Spanish varieties, these findings lend support to the idea that intergestural coordination patterns can be dialect-specific.

Data for closure duration and the stop burst, as well as on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments, reveal that speakers of Valencian Catalan produce differently the clusters /lts/ and /ls/, and /rts/ and /rs/, where /t/ is an underlying phoneme in /lts, rts/ and stop epenthesis may occur in /ls, rs/. Only a subset of speakers contrast the production of the nasal cluster pairs /mps/–/ms/ and /nts/–/ns/. Stop epenthesis applies regularly in the sequences /ms, ns, ls, ʎs, ɲs/ but the inserted segment is only phonetically robust in the two latter clusters with an alveolopalatal consonant and to some extent in /ns/, and practically absent in the sequence /rs/. Differences in prominence for the stop consonant, whether underlying or epenthetic, occur as a function of the segmental composition of the cluster, as well as of utterance position and syllable and word affiliation. In conjunction with results from perception tests, it is claimed that these data contribute to our understanding of oral stop deletion after a (quasi-)homorganic consonant in word final clusters without /s/ in other dialects of Catalan and perhaps other languages.

This paper presents a pilot study of the acoustic correlates of the Plains Cree vowel system. Naturalistic recordings of speakers of mid-20th-century Plains Cree, including one monolingual speaker, provide an empirical test for the general expectations from phonological descriptions. The results demonstrate that, while the hypothesized short/long vowel pairs do indeed have a strong durational contrast, the majority of vowel pairs are also distinguished by their formants. In all cases, the long vowel occupies a more extreme position in the vowel space. Plains Cree thus appears to show both a quantity and a quality contrast in its vowel pairs. The individual speaker data are then normalized to test whether there is intra-speaker variation in these results, with the results showing variation in the relation between vowels in all three parts of the vowel space.

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A consequence of the 1945 Scarborough Report, which recommended an expansion of the teaching of non-European languages in British universities, was the appointment of a group of young scholars to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at London University's School of Oriental & African Studies. Amongst their number was Keith Sprigg, who died on September 8th 2011 at the age of 89.

In the obituary of Edward (Ted) Carney in Volume 34, Issue 1 (June 2004), it was stated that he did National Service. His youngest son, David Olof Carney, would like it to be made clear that his father signed up voluntarily and served in the Hussars, and did not do National Service.