Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /pt ʈ ck/ in three vowel contexts /aiu/. We present word-medial stop burst data from nine speakers, examining duration, formant, spectral moment and spectral tilt measures. Our particular focus is on the apical contrast (alveolar /t/ vs. retroflex /ʈ/) and on the alveo-palatal /c/ vs. velar /k/ contrast. We observe differences between the palatal and the velar depending on vowel context, and we discuss the possible aerodynamic and acoustic sources for these differences. By contrast, we find that differences between the alveolar and the retroflex are minimal in all three vowel contexts. Unexpectedly, in the context of /i/, various spectral measures suggest that the articulatory release for the retroflex /ʈ/ is in fact more anterior than the release for the alveolar /t/ – we discuss this result in terms of possible articulatory overshoot of the target for /ʈ/ before /i/, and suggest that this result provides additional explanation for the cross-linguistic rarity of retroflexes in an /i/ vowel context.

Slovak (sometimes also called Slovakian) is an Indo-European language belonging to the West-Slavic branch, and is most closely related to Czech. Slovak is spoken as a native language by 4.6 million speakers in Slovakia (that is by roughly 85% of the population), and by over two million Slovaks living abroad, most of them in the USA, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Canada and Great Britain (Office for Slovaks Living Abroad 2009).

Although the segmental properties of Kyungsang Korean have been known to be distinct from those of standard Seoul Korean, the increased influence of Seoul Korean on the regional variety casts doubt on the homogeneity of the dialect. The current study investigated whether the acoustic properties of the vowels and fricatives in Kyungsang Korean are retained by both younger and older generations through a comparison with Seoul Korean. Results of acoustic analyses with 38 female Korean speakers differing in dialect (Kyungsang, Seoul) and age (older, younger) showed that the younger Kyungsang speakers did not maintain the vowel and fricative features unique to their regional dialect, but rather approximate those of standard Seoul Korean. In the acoustic study of vowels, measures of formant frequencies showed that the younger Kyungsang and Seoul speakers share seven vowels, which result from the split of /ʌ/–/ɨ/ in Kyungsang and the merger of /e/–/ε/ in Seoul Korean. In the acoustic study of fricatives, measures of fricative duration and center of gravity showed that while the two-way fricative contrast is less distinct for older Kyungsang speakers, younger speakers clearly distinguish the two fricatives similar to Seoul speakers. As a consequence of these generational changes in Kyungsang Korean, the six vowels and lack of a fricative contrast exhibited by older generations have given way to seven vowels and a clear distinction between fortis and non-fortis fricatives for younger generations. Based on the similarities in segmental properties between younger Kyungsang and Seoul speakers, it appears that the diachronic sound change is underway in South Kyungsang Korean under the influence of Seoul Korean.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-ŋk/ cluster (e.g. tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years.

This paper investigates how the tonal targets of rises in Persian are phonetically realized in relation to the segmental string. Three types of cliticized Persian Accentual Phrases (APs) are instrumentally compared with one another: high-boundary-toned pre-nuclear APs, low-boundary-toned nuclear APs, and low-boundary-toned contrastive focus APs. The results show that the valley is always aligned with the consonant preceding the stressed vowel, but the alignment of the peak is with the consonant following the stressed vowel if the AP boundary tone is low, and with the following vowel if it is high. The duration of the focus AP is greater than that of the other two. The pitch excursion of the focus AP is significantly greater than that of the nuclear type. This difference is caused by different peak heights. While pre-nuclear and nuclear APs can be phonologically represented by L + H*, focus APs, which are pragmatically different, warrant a distinct pitch accent, namely L + ^H*. The systematic alignment of the L and the H, and the variability of the time and slope of the rise support the view that pitch targets rather than pitch movements are the fundamentals of Persian intonation.

The Lizu (or Lüzu) language (/EPli-zu-hu/ or /EPly-zu-hu/) is spoken by approximately 7000 people who reside along the banks of the Yalong (雅 砻) or Nyag chu River in three counties in Sichuan Province (四 川 省) in the People's Republic of China: (i) Muli Tibetan Autonomous County 木 里 藏 族 自 治 县 (Written Tibetan, hereafter WT, smi li rang skyong rdzong), (ii) Jiulong county (九 龙 县 brgyad zur), (iii) Mianning county (冕 宁 县) (Wang 2010: 3).1 Lizu is currently considered as the western dialect of the Ersu 尔 苏 language (Sun 1982, 1983), which is in turn classified as a member of the Qiangic subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman language family (for more details, see Bradley 1997: 36–37; Sun 2001; Chirkova 2012).

The Czech language has two trills produced with the anterior tongue, represented in the Czech orthography as /r/ and /ř/. The phonetic characterization of the latter trill, currently transcribed in the IPA as [ ], has been especially controversial. The present study uses ultrasound, electroglottography (EGG) and acoustic evidence to examine these trills, with the particular aim of achieving a more phonetically grounded representation of /ř/. In the first part of the paper, ultrasound imaging is used to compare tongue positions between /r/ and /ř/, ruling out tongue height as the key factor distinguishing the two sounds. The second part uses EGG and acoustic evidence to examine phonatory aspects of production. Results implicate vocal fold abduction as the more robust factor distinguishing /r/ from /ř/. Consequently, we posit [ ] as a more appropriate phonetic characterization of /ř/.

The variety described here is Standard Hindi used in everyday casual speech by educated speakers in cities such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Delhi, etc. Although there are a few differences in pronunciation among speakers of these cities, the differences are minimal. The transcription is based on a recording of a female third generation speaker of Standard Hindi who grew up mostly in Uttar Pradesh before moving to Delhi. For a detailed analysis of Hindi segments see Dixit (1963) and Ohala (1983).

The style of speech illustrated is that of Educated Colloquial Hungarian of the 1990's as spoken in Budapest. Historically, Standard Hungarian is based on the Eastern dialect, which became a supra-dialectal high prestige variety during the 18th century. The speech on the recording is that of a male speaker in his fifties with an academic background, using a somewhat advanced style of speech as spoken in a formal communicative situation.

This paper is an account of facts gleaned from the auditory analysis of thirty-seven recordings made in the Department of Phonetics, University of Edinburgh, between 1949 and 1966. Every student and staff member in the Department (which was merged with the Department of Linguistics in 1967) was recorded reading a standard passage, ‘The Story of Arthur the Rat’. There were actually two versions of the story used. The earlier one, used until 1957, contains two fewer potential linking /r/s than the later version, which is that published in Abercrombie (1964).

Ibibio is a Lower Cross (Delta Cross, Cross River, New Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo) language spoken mainly in Akwa Ibom State and in parts of Cross River State, both located in the southeastern part of Nigeria. The number of speakers is estimated at about four million (Essien 1991). Previous work on Ibibio phonetics includes Connell (1992, 1994, 1995) and Urua (1996/97, 2000, 2002). The variety presented here is spoken in Uruan area and Uyo, the capital city of Akwa Ibom State and the recording is that of the author, a female university teacher from Uruan.

The Tai dialect spoken in Cao Bằng province, Vietnam, is at an intermediate stage between tonal register split and the accompanying transphonologization of a voicing contrast into a dual-register tone system. While the initial sonorants have completely lost their historical voicing distinction and developed a six-way tonal contrast, the obstruent series still preserves the original voicing contrast, leaving the tonal split incomplete. This paper presents the first acoustic study of tones and onsets in Cao Bằng Tai. Although f0, VOT, and voice quality were all found to play a role in the system of laryngeal contrasts, the three speakers considered varied in terms of the patterns of acoustic cues used to distinguish between onset types, particularly the breathy voiced onset //. From the diachronic perspective, our findings may help to explain why the reflex of modal pre-voiced stops (*b) can be either aspirated or unaspirated voiceless stops.

This paper presents parts of the results of the first stage in the phonetic documentation of Fering, a dialect of North Frisian. Descriptions of Fering indicate that it has a large vowel inventory (15 monophthongs, 7 diphthongs, and 3 triphthongs). Ten older male native speakers were recorded, producing the vowel and consonant inventory at different speaking rates, in different phonetic contexts, and in different speaking styles. The results of the acoustic analyses of the vowels of Fering throw light on the questions of a) how the vowel space is exploited in Fering, b) how Fering differentiates its large vowel inventory, c) to what extent consonant–vowel coarticulation affects the acoustic differentiation of vowel categories, and d) to what extent the implementation of the long–short vowel contrasts is affected by speaking rate. The results also provide a more accurate description of the vowel system of an endangered language than do previous auditory accounts.

This paper reports how stress and the position of the /ns/ cluster in polysyllabic words affect [t] epenthesis in four different environments: (1) word-medial after a stressed vowel (e.g. 'cen.sus vs. 'dentsus); (2) word-final after a stressed vowel (e.g. in.'tense vs. in'tents); (3) word-medial after a stressless vowel (e.g. con.'sent vs. blunt 'say.ing); and (4) word-final after a stressless vowel (e.g. 'sci.ence vs. 'con.tents). Analysis of stop closure durations in experimental sentences read by seven American English speakers reveals that position, not stress, is the most important factor in [t] epenthesis: final position (e.g. science and intense) favors epenthesis. Stress is found to have an effect on stop closure durations in the way it interacted with word-position – i.e. for the final /ns/ cluster, stress immediately before it disfavors epenthesis (e.g. intense). The underlying /t/ is shown to be not significantly longer than the epenthetic [t]. Measurements from polysyllabic words in the TIMIT corpus corroborate the experimental results that word-final position favors epenthesis and that stress does not correlate with epenthesis. In the TIMIT data, however, underlying /t/ was significantly longer than epenthetic [t].

Tamambo is an Oceanic language spoken on the western half of the island of Malo in northern Vanuatu. There are at least 3000 speakers of the language, most of them living on Malo, with several hundred residing on the neighboring island of Santo and in the country's capital, Port Vila. Many speakers are also fluent in Bislama (an English-lexifier creole spoken in Vanuatu), one of three official languages. A dialect of Tamambo spoken on the eastern half of the island is now almost extinct, the main phonetic differences from the western dialect being the lack of prenasalized stops and labialized consonants, and the short articulation of vowels. Previous phonetic work on Tamambo is limited to a descriptive grammar of the language (Jauncey 1997).

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.

Yine [ˈjine] (previously known as Piro, ISO 639-3 = pib) is a Maipuran language (Payne 1991, Campbell 1997, Solís Fonseca 2003). See Payne (1991) and Campbell (1997) for discussion of the relationship of the Maipuran (or Maipurean) languages to the controversial Arawakan stock. There are approximately 3,000 speakers of Yine in the Peruvian Amazon. People in Brazil and Bolivia known as Manchineri (alternative spellings exist; ISO 639-3 = mpd) also speak a dialect of Yine (Urquía Sebastián 2006a).

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.