This study presents jaw movement data from Central Arrernte, an Australian Aboriginal language with six places of articulation in the stop series, including four coronal places of articulation. The focus of the study is on jaw consonant targets, and on the opening and closing movements of the jaw. As a point of comparison, data are also presented for English, a language with three places of articulation in the stop series. In line with previous results for English, jaw position in Arrernte is lowest for the velar /k/. The apico-post-alveolar (retroflex) /ʈ/, which is not found in English, has a jaw position almost as low as /k/. By contrast, the lamino-alveo-palatal /c/, which is also not found in English, has the highest jaw position. The remaining coronal consonants in Arrernte, /t / (apico-alveolar and lamino-dental, respectively), show intermediate jaw positions, with differences between speakers. In terms of the kinematic measures examined (namely, variability in distance, duration and velocity of opening and closing movements), results show no consistent differences between English and Arrernte jaw movement.

Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipatory nasalization, as suggested by previous aerodynamic and acoustic analyses (Butcher 1999). The current study uses aerodynamic measurements of speech to investigate patterns of nasalization and nasal articulation in Bininj Kunwok to compare with Australian languages more generally. The role of nasal coarticulation in ensuring language compre-hensibility a key question in phonetics research today is explored. Nasal aerodynamics is measured in intervocalic, word-medial nasals in the speech of five female speakers of BKw and data are analyzed using Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA) and Functional Data Analysis averaging techniques. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalization with no restriction on carryover nasalization for a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed until the oral release of a nasal for coronal articulations, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. Patterns of anticipatory nasalization appears similar to nasal airflow in French non-nasalized vowels in oral vowel plus nasal environments (Delvaux et al. 2008). Findings show that Bininj Kunwok speakers use language specific strategies in order to limit anticipatory nasalization, enhancing place of articulation cues at a site of intonational prominence which also is also the location of the majority of place of articulation contrasts within the language. Patterns of airflow suggest enhancement and coarticulatory resistance in prosodically prominent VN and VNC sequences which we interpret as evidence of speakers maintaining a phonological contrast to enhance place of articulation cues.

The purpose of this note is to present and discuss more direct data than has hitherto been available on the vibration of the vocal folds following the release of Korean stops.

Ega is an endangered language spoken in the south-central region of Côte d'Ivoire, in Divo Department. The precise number of speakers is not known at present; the 14th Ethnologue (Grimes 2000) reports 291 to 3,000, and notes that ‘the ethnic group is growing, but they are shifting to the Dida language because of intermarriage and other influences’. Our own preliminary and impressionistic work suggests the number of Ega speakers to be closer to the upper end of this range, perhaps around 2,000, but we note that Ega now serves a decreasing number of sociolinguistic functions, to the extent that in at least some villages Dida has replaced Ega as the primary language of daily use. It is also clear that the degree of intergenerational transmission is low in many, if not all, Ega villages.

Research in the past few decades has shown that Northern Bizkaian Basque possesses a pitch-accent system of the Tokyo Japanese type, with a contrast between lexically accented and unaccented words. There is, however, a separate area of the Basque-speaking territory where we also find tonal accent phenomena: Western Navarre. In comparison with Northern Bizkaian, the Western Navarrese prosodic system has remained under-studied and ill-understood. In this paper, which focuses on the Western Navarrese Basque variety spoken in the town of Goizueta, we demonstrate that both stress and tone are lexically contrastive in this prosodic system. Words can be stressed on either the first or the second syllable of the stem and the stressed syllable is lexically specified as bearing one of two contours, in a way that is reminiscent of other European pitch-accent languages. We show that stress is consistently cued by both duration and relative intensity. Pitch contours are used for an independent contrast in accent type. The existence of contrastive tone in Western Navarrese Basque, in addition to contrastive stress, was not previously known. Basque may be one of the few languages where both Tokyo-type and Swedish-type lexical pitch-accent systems are concurrently attested and can still be phonetically and phonologically investigated.

Seri (self-designation: cmiique iitom [kwĩki:tom]) is a language isolate spoken in the state of Sonora, Mexico, by about 800 people. In this description we present a variety that is typical of the majority of speakers. The recordings are of one of the authors (XMH), a male speaker born in 1964. The technical description is based on Moser & Moser (1965), although the analysis has been updated to agree with the data and arguments presented in Marlett (1981, 1988) and Moser (1996).

In a study of European Portuguese fricatives it was noted that /R, / were often realized as [χ, ], which are, respectively, unvoiced and voiced uvular fricative, and voiceless tapped alveolar fricative. Although these phones have not previously been recognized as occurring in European Portuguese, they occurred in 115 words out of a corpus of 1304 words, out of which 107 words could be analysed, in recordings made by four native speakers (two men, two women). Time- and frequency-averaged power spectral characteristics are presented, together with a detailed temporal analysis. The frequencies of high-amplitude peaks in the [χ] and [] spectra clearly indicate a back place of articulation, with median duration across subjects and words of 69 ms and 35 ms. The short (approximately 20 ms), noisy acoustic signal in [] suggests a stop-like manner of articulation, but the turbulence noise characteristics, similar to fricatives, differ from the transient burst noise of plosives.

This Illustration focuses on the variety of the Xumi language (旭米, /LPʂuketɕɜ/ or /EPʂu-hĩ ketɕɜ/) that is spoken in the upper reaches of the Shuiluo river (水洛河) in Shuiluo Township (水洛乡) (hereafter Upper Xumi). The township is located in Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县, smi li rang skyong rdzong in Written Tibetan, hereafter, WT), in the South-West of Sichuan Province (四川省) in the People's Republic of China.

The autocorrelation function, a measure of regularity in the speech signal, is applied in demarcating the seemingly diffuse intervals of glottalization which accompany or replace voiceless oral stops in elicited recordings from 22 young speakers of Southern British English. It is shown that a local minimum in autocorrelation characterizes almost all instances heard as intervocalic glottal stops; an annotation procedure is developed and used to gather data on glottalization gestures, including duration, f0, energy and autocorrelation. The same measure is used to assess regularity of vocal fold vibration in an interval just prior to the formation of the total closure for instances of syllable-final /t/, and confirms significantly lower autocorrelation in a group auditorily judged ‘pre-glottalized’. Implications are considered both for normal speech perception and for expert phonetic judgments.

Informal observation of Belfast speakers finds a larger number of falls in careful speaking styles than the literature would suggest is the case, since Belfast English is reported to be one of the minority varieties of English in which the rise predominates in both interrogatives and declaratives. Three different speaking styles, ranging from careful to spontaneous are elicited from twelve seventeen-year-old Belfast speakers, and the nuclear accents analysed. In the majority of speakers, there is a tendency to use more falling nuclei when the speech style is careful, and fewer or none at all in the most informal style. It is suggested that this is an attempt, in formal contexts, to emulate the prestige variety of the language, which is probably that spoken in Southern England, and uses a preponderance of falling nuclei. Female speakers show more willingness than males to use the features of the prestige variety, which may be explained by social, cultural and complex contextual reasons.

A sixteenth-century sound change in Scots has resulted in the appearance in that language of a system of vowel-length variations strikingly different from the common Germanic system still visible in other West Germanic speech forms. The present situation is described by the set of rules known as Aitken's Law (Aitken 1962 and 1977; see also Lass 1974): all vowels and diphthongs are long in stressed open syllables, before voiced fricatives and /r/, and before morpheme boundaries; and short elsewhere; with the two exceptions of /ι/ and /ʌ/ which are invariably short.

Acoustic analysis of word-list and sentence data from a database of spoken New Zealand English is used to address the suggestion that a number of vowel contrasts in this variety are moving towards a quantity-based distinction. Data from 73 speakers across three age groups and two sexes are analysed, for a total of almost 6,000 vowel tokens. The move to a quantity distinction is confirmed for the strut‒start contrast. In the case of dress and fleece, younger and female speakers show greater overlap of the two vowels but also stronger diphthongisation of fleece. The data also confirm the fronting of foot away from thought and towards goose, but with no evident adjustment in durational contrasts or in the diphthongisation of either long vowel. Kit is becoming increasingly centralised, especially in the speech of young women, and is as a consequence becoming more distinct from nurse. The findings are discussed in the context of the system of vowel contrasts in this variety.

Many phonetic and phonological processes resemble one another, which has led some researchers to suggest that phonetics and phonology are essentially the same. This study compares phonetic and phonological processes of consonant lengthening by analyzing duration measurements collected from Hungarian speakers (n = 14). Affricates, which crucially possess a two-part structure, were placed in target positions. Results show that affricates regularly undergo phonetic lengthening at phrase boundaries, and the affected portion of the affricate is always that which lies closer to the boundary. Affricates also regularly undergo phonological lengthening when next to a geminating suffix, but the affected portion of the affricate is always the stop closure. Thus, while phonetic lengthening observes a strict respect for locality, phonological lengthening does not, and we conclude that the two processes are in fact quite different from one another.

Different types of non-pulmonic sound production found in read and spontaneous German are described and exemplified. Stop releases driven by a glottalic airstream are found in sequences of final plosive plus glottalized vowel onset. Both ingressive and egressive velaric stop releases are considered to arise from double occlusions involving partial articulatory overlap in sequences of dorsal stop followed by an apical or bilabial stop. Certain aspects of the articulatory and aerodynamic mechanisms involved remain unclear. However, it is argued that an identification of these patterns in the acoustic record alone provides an invaluable insight into aspects of articulatory synchronization in types of spoken language, such as conversation, which are not generally amenable to the more intrusive methods of articulatory analysis.

It has been observed by many writers on English phonetics that /p/, /t/, /k/ and /tʃ/ are frequently glottalized, i.e. produced with closed glottis. This observation raises a variety of interesting questions. Firstly, the phonological environments in which glottalization occurs have yet to be satisfactorily described; a preliminary attempt at a re-statement was made in Roach (1973) and a fuller account presented in Roach (1978). Secondly, it is of interest to study the articulatory mechanisms used in the production of glottalization, both from the point of view of finding out more about how laryngeal closures in speech are produced, and also with respect to the temporal organization of the laryngeal and supralaryngeal closures. Thirdly, since the incidence of glottalization (and of the closely related phenomenon of glottal replacement) appears to vary according to geographical and social factors, age and sex, it is of interest in dialectological and sociolinguistic studies of English. Finally, in a wider context, glottalization may be studied as being potentially an on-going sound change in English, and as a phenomenon that might possibly be linked with similar laryngeal articulations in other languages, e.g. the stød of Standard Danish and of West Jutland Danish.

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.

Kabiye is a Gur (Voltaic) language that belongs to the Eastern Grusi (also Gurunsi) sub-branch of Central Gur, which in turn sub-branches from Gur that is part of the greater Niger-Congo language family (Naden 1989: 147). The number of native Kabiye speakers is estimated at 730,000, with approximately 700,000 speakers living in Togo, 30,000 in Benin, and a very small number in Ghana (Grimes 2000: 242). The original homeland of the Kabiye people is in Northeastern Togo, with the region of Kozah serving as the community's cultural center. From the early 20th century, however, the community began to spread southward and now encompasses locations in the central and southern parts of Togo, as well as in the neighboring countries (Ali-Napo 1997: 20).

Hiatus occurs when the juxtaposition of syllables results in two separate vowels occurring alongside one another. Such vowel adjacency, both within words and across word boundaries, is phonologically undesirable in many languages but can be resolved using a range of strategies including consonant insertion. This paper examines linguistic and extralinguistic factors that best predict the likelihood of inserted linking ‘r’ across word boundaries in Australian English. Corpus data containing a set of 32 phrases produced in a sentence-reading task by 103 speakers were auditorily and acoustically analysed. Results reveal that linguistic variables of accentual context and local speaking rate take precedence over speaker-specific variables of age, gender and sociolect in the management of hiatus. We interpret this to be a reflection of the phonetic manifestation of boundary phenomena. The frequency of the phrase containing the linking ‘r’, the frequency of an individual's use of linking ‘r’, and the accentual status of the flanking vowels all affect the /ɹ/ strength (determined by F3), suggesting that a hybrid approach is warranted in modelling liaison. Age effects are present for certain prosodic contexts indicating change in progress for Australian English.