The present study examined lexical stress patterns in Uyghur, a Turkic language. The main goal of this research was to isolate and determine which acoustic parameters provide cues to stress in Uyghur. A number of studies have investigated the phonetic correlates of lexical stress across the world's languages, with stressed syllables often longer in duration, higher in pitch, and greater in amplitude. The present study systematically investigated the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur, examining duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. Three experiments were conducted: one utilizing minimal pairs in Uyghur, one examining disyllabic nouns in Uyghur that contrasted in the first syllable, and one investigating the interaction of lexical stress with Uyghur sentence intonation. The data consistently show that duration was a robust cue to stress in Uyghur, with less consistent effects for intensity. The data also clearly show that fundamental frequency was not a cue to lexical stress in Uyghur. Uyghur does not use the fundamental frequency to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. The results suggest that Uyghur does not pattern like a pitch-accent language (e.g. Turkish), but rather like a stress-accent language.

Sumi (also known by its exonym ‘Sema’) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, North-east India. It is one of the major languages of the state, with an estimated 242,000 speakers living primarily in Zunheboto district, as well as in the major cities of Kohima and Dimapur. Bradley (1997) places Sumi (referred to as Sema), among the ‘Southern Naga’ languages, which include Angami (also known as Tenyidie) and Ao, in contrast to the ‘Northern Naga’ languages such as Konyak and Nocte. Burling (2003) offers a more conservative classification, placing Sumi (referred to as Simi) in an ‘Angami-Pochuri’ group containing Angami, Chakhesang (Chokri and Kheza) and Mao. Four main dialects of Sumi have been identified: the Western dialect, the Eastern dialect, the Chizolimi dialect, and the Central dialect. The Central dialect is the standard dialect used in published works of Sumi (Sreedhar 1976: 4–5).

Articulatory explanations are often proposed to account for many of the phonetic patterns found in speech beyond the citation form. Unscripted material from Suffolk English and North German is used to argue that articulatory explanation can too tightly constrain our expectations of the types of phonetic patterns which spontaneous speech contains. It is also shown how articulatory explanation can offer an adequate account of a dataset, stopping short of revealing a larger, more complex set of phonetic patterns.

The dialect of Western Pennsylvania is one of the chief varieties of American English and may be considered a subdialect of the so-called General American speech. The dialect has Pittsburgh for its focal point and extends for a radius of probably no more than 200 miles around that city.

In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identifiable by listeners, but as part of the speech stream, it is usually easily identified and helps the listener to perceive and organize the spoken message as a whole. Thus, the variability of unaccented words is not random but must follow certain patterns determined by context. In this study, we take a closer look at the Finnish unaccented word-like construction niinku in spontaneous conversational speech samples collected from one female Finnish speaker. We provide an analysis of the phonetic variability of the niinku structure found in the data, including such properties as segmental duration, segmental make-up, and phonetic quality. We then show what kind of properties are common to all occurrences of this unaccented construction and discuss the conditions that probably govern its acoustic-phonetic quality.

A great deal of recent research has focused on phonetic variation among American English vowels from different dialects. This body of research continues to grow as vowels continuously undergo diachronic formant changes that become characteristic of certain dialects. Two experiments using the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper & Pisoni 2006a) explored whether the Midland dialect is more closely related acoustically and perceptually to the Mid-Atlantic or to the Southern dialect. The goal of this study was to further our understanding of acoustic and perceptual differences between two of the most marked dialects (Mid-Atlantic and Southern) and one of the least marked dialects (Midland) of American English. Ten vowels in /hVd/ context produced by one male talker from each of these three dialects were acoustically analyzed and presented to Midland listeners for identification. The listeners showed the greatest vowel identification accuracy for the Mid-Atlantic talker (95.2%), followed by the Midland talker (92.5%), and finally the Southern talker (79.7%). Vowel error patterns were consistent with vowel acoustic differences between the talkers. The results suggest that, acoustically and perceptually, the Midland and Mid-Atlantic dialects are more similar than are the Midland and Southern dialects.

Romani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in several European countries as well as in the Americas, Asia and Australia, showing substantial dialectal variation. This illustration deals with Xoraxane Romane (Turkish Romani) spoken in Greek Thrace. Xoraxane Romane, which belongs to the Vlax branch of Romani, has been heavily influenced by contact with Turkish and also shows influences from Greek. As a result, Xoraxane Romane exhibits a mixed system that includes phonemes borrowed from both Turkish and Greek but without exhibiting complex phonological phenomena such as Turkish vowel harmony.

A’ingae (also known as Cofán or Kofán) is a language isolate spoken by approximately 1,500 people in 13 communities in Ecuador and Colombia (Figure 1). Traditionally, the A’i (speakers of A’ingae) lived in the Andean foothills, but over the past century they have migrated down the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, founding communities at Dureno and Zábalo, where the language is most widely spoken. This migration was spurred in large part by extensive oil contamination; an issue of great concern to the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People (FSC) and the community at large (Cepek 2012: 103; 2018: 1–15). Another concern in the Cofán community is the decreasing use of A’ingae, which, according to Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig 2017), is ‘endangered’ in Ecuador and ‘severely endangered’ in Colombia as a growing emphasis on Spanish disincentivizes the younger generation from learning A’ingae.

Arop-Lokep, an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea, has a contrast between a trilled /r/ and a geminate /rr/ in both intervocalic and word-initial positions. This paper presents the results of acoustic and perceptual experiments involving these segments. Specifically, we probe the statistical characteristics of the /r/ vs. /rr/ contrast across prosodic positions from the perspective of both the speaker and the listener. We measure trills in 24 different Arop-Lokep words, so the resulting data are quite robust and give an excellent idea of the variation inherent in the language. A novel finding is that both lengths of trill consist of more apical contacts word-initially than intervocalically. The scope of this work is unprecedented in that no previous instrumental study has examined both initial and medial geminate trills in the same language.

This study investigated speaker sex differences in the temporal and spectro-temporal parameters of English monosyllabic words spoken by thirteen women and eleven men. Vowel and utterance duration were investigated. A number of formant frequency parameters were also analysed to assess the spectro-temporal dynamic structures of the monosyllabic words as a function of speaker sex. Absolute frequency changes were measured for the first (F1), second (F2), and third (F3) formant frequencies (ΔF1, ΔF2, and ΔF3, respectively). Rates of these absolute formant frequency changes were also measured and calculated to yield measurements for rF1, rF2, and rF3. Normalised frequency changes (normΔF1, normΔF2, and normΔF3), and normalised rates of change (normrF1, normrF2, and normrF3) were also calculated. F2 locus equations were then derived from the F2 measurements taken at the onset and temporal mid points of the vowels. Results indicated that there were significant sex differences in the spectro-temporal parameters associated with F2: ΔF2, normΔF2, rF2, and F2 locus equation slopes; women displayed significantly higher values for ΔF2, normΔF2 and rF2, and significantly shallower F2 locus equation slopes. Collectively, these results suggested lower levels of coarticulation in the speech samples of the women speakers, and corroborate evidence reported in earlier studies.

Venetian shows great vitality. In everyday life it is used by almost everybody: not only the general population but also physicians, lawyers, and teachers speak it regularly. It is estimated that it has at least 100,000 speakers.

This article examines first to second language (L1-to-L2) phonetic transfer in the speech of ten Occitan–French bilinguals, focusing on the mid-vowels in each of their languages. Investigating transfer in a situation of long-term societal language contact aims to shed light on the emergence of regional French phonological features from contact with Occitan. Using a sociophonetic methodology, the concept of equivalence classification (Flege 1988) is investigated, that is, that L2 words will be (initially) decomposed into familiar L2 sound categories, causing L1 and L2 sounds to resemble each other phonetically. The consequences of language contact are modelled statistically using an original corpus of over 1200 vowel tokens. The findings show that equivalence classification may not lead to equated sounds coming to resemble each other phonetically, suggesting necessary revisions to the speech learning model (SLM) hypothesis, and the need to consider the influence of sociolinguistic factors in situations of long-term language contact is emphasised.

Kera is an Eastern Chadic language spoken by about 50,000 people in southwestern Chad, south of the town of Fianga, and in major towns of Cameroon and Chad. Most Kera speakers would claim to speak a standard variety of Kera although there is some variation depending on gender and location. The differences involve the relationship between tone and voicing, the number of contrastive tones and the presence or absence of a voicing contrast. Women are more conservative than men in the use of tone in rural settings and more innovative than men in urban settings (Pearce 2009). Previous literature on Kera includes Ebert (1975, 1976, 1979) and Pearce (1999, 2006a, b, c, 2007a, 2008, 2009).

Laurie Bauer seems to have let his imagination run away with him (Bauer, 1979). On the one hand, he has been misled by the similarity of phenomena in a number of accents of English into thinking that there is a common vowel shift in progress. On the other hand, he has been too selective and somewhat undiscriminating in his choice of corroborating evidence.

Phonemic clicks are geographically limited to the African continent, but non-phonemic clicks can also occur in languages spoken elsewhere. One of the phonetic peculiarities of clicks is that they involve negative intraoral pressure. The current study is a survey of instances of negative intraoral pressure excursions in German, a European language which is known to show instances of weak clicks in consonant sequences. Data of spontaneous speech in monologues and read passages from 14 female subjects are analysed. Our data provide evidence that negative pressure occurs frequently in speech production, in particular in pauses (between speech intervals), and in consonant sequences. Of particular interest is that clicks can also occur without an obvious dual closure in the vocal tract. Negative pressure in pauses occurs frequently with clicks (but not exclusively) which are aligned with the pressure minimum. We conclude that these aligned clicks are epiphenomenal and reflect the interaction of the respiratory and the laryngeal systems. In consonant sequences, clicks may be present more often with front–back consonant order than the reverse, but in both cases negative pressure can be found.

In Malaysia, Kedayan (ISO code ‘kxd’) speakers are found primarily in the state of Sabah, the state of Sarawak, and the federal territory of Labuan, which is an offshore island near Sabah. Lewis (2009) classifies Kedayan as one of the many Malayic dialects within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian languages.

This article is an account of the intonation of a variety of Welsh English. The layman's perception of a South Wales ‘Valleys’ accent is that, along with many other Welsh accents of English, it has a highly tuneful intonation which is distinct from that in any other part of the British Isles. The article sets out to describe the phonetic features of the main intonational forms that contribute towards this ‘melody’. This is done with the aid of a modified ToBI transcription system and supporting acoustic readings, which together enable reference to both pitch movements and pitch levels at any point in the overall ‘tune’ of an intonational phrase. Most of the distinctive melody-forming features of the dialect are found to be connected with the different kinds of accent-contour occurring at non-final and final (‘nuclear’) accents, and the phonetic realisations of these accent-contours. Finally, some discussion takes place on what may be general discourse meanings associated with the different intonational forms described in the dialect.