In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voiceless segments from five distinct places of articulation. Our corpus contains all of the Greek fricatives produced by 29 monolingual speakers, but our focus is on the distinction between the front nonsibilant fricatives [f v θ ð]. For comparison, we also discuss the other places of articulation where relevant. We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients, previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts (Bunnell, Polikoff & McNicholas 2004), English vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010), Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley 2016), and Russian fricatives (Spinu, Kochetov & Lilley 2018). For this study, fricative boundaries were automatically aligned using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and then manually checked. Six Bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (c0–c5) were extracted from 20-millisecond Hann windows. HMMs were used to divide the fricatives and adjacent vowels into three regions of internally minimized variance. A multinomial logistic regression analysis then used the mean cepstral coefficients from each region as predictors for classification by consonant identity. Our method yields highly successful classification rates, exceeding the performance of previous methods. We discuss these results in light of the differences of the phonemic distributions of fricatives between English and Greek.

Nivaĉle [niβaˈe] (ISO 639-3: cag) is a Mataguayan language spoken in the Argentinean and Paraguayan Chaco by approximately 16,350 speakers in Paraguay (DGEEC 2012) and 553 in Argentina (INDEC 2004–2005).

In this 2005 interview, Peter Ladefoged, Distinguished Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at UCLA and USC Adjunct Professor, spoke candidly about his long and distinguished career as a scholar and instructor, as a former President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and as an editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA). Professor Ladefoged died on 24 January 2006, and numerous tributes to him have since appeared, including in JIPA 36.1 (June 2006). Among the topics treated in this interview are: the history and future of phonetics, the founding and growth of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory, and Ladefoged's views on scholarly writing and on the place of phonetics both within linguistics and within humanistic and social scientific disciplines, more broadly. Professor Ladefoged had read proofs of the interview and approved the text, which was completed in the fall of 2005. The text of this interview was originally published in Semiotica 158 (2006) and is reprinted here with permission from Mouton de Gruyter.

Martin Kioster-Jensen (1991) has traced the origin of the view that [h] is a glottal fricative back to the German scholar Brücke (1876). According to MK-J, this wrong view has been repeated in the manuals of phonetics since then and appears again in the new IPA consonant chart.

Tukang Besi is an archipelago in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where an Austronesian language is spoken. The speech represented here is that of the north-west coast of the island of Wanci. With mainly slight lexical variation it represents the speech of the two northernmost islands in the archipelago, Wanci and Kaledupa.

Amarasi (ISO 693–3 aaz), spoken in the south-western part of the island of Timor, is at one end of the complex Uab Meto language chain. Uab Meto (also called Dawan[ese], Timorese or Atoni) is a cluster of closely related Austronesian languages and dialects spoken in Timor.

This paper aims at describing the click accompaniments of |Gui, a little known Central Khoisan language, and presenting some new findings which may contribute to general phonetics as well as Khoisan linguistics. The phonetic features described here are based upon linguistic field research by the author into the |Gui language in the Xade area, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, from August to December in 1992, from August to October in 1993 and from August to December in 1994.

The study of the temporal organization of spoken language has developed greatly over the past three decades. Segment based analyses, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) looked at temporal patterns and other physical properties of speech as being “supplied by universal rules.” However, several researchers have published experimental evidence which indicates that temporal differences do exist between languages and have to be learned (Lehiste 1970, 1984, 1987, Port, Al-Ani & Maeda 1980, Keating 1979, Flege 1979, Flege & Port 1981, Mitleb 1984a, 1984b).

The appearance of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association offers a natural opportunity for taking both a look backward and a look forward in the field of phonetics. Ever since the publication of The Phonetic Teacher in 1886 and through the long period of Le Maître Phonétique, the organ of the Association has continued to appear, even if during war years the interval between successive numbers may sometimes have been long. It now comes in a new guise, the major change being the setting of the body of the journal in orthography instead of in phonetic transcription, and this is a suitable moment at which to ask what this change, a far from superficial one, betokens: what kind of scholars were the men who formed the Association and guided its early years, was their work of lasting value, what fresh light has been shed on the field in the intervening period, where do we stand now and what guesses can we make about the sort of work our successors will be doing?

The two phonemes which, in Standard English and the dialects of southern English, inasmuch as the latter deviate from the standard, have shown a tendency to be lost, /h/ and /r/1, at least in certain positions, have been fully retained in all varieties of Irish English. There is no /h/-dropping (Wells 1982:23ff.) in Irish English and /r/ is maintained in all positions where it is indicated by the orthography. The orthography offers a convenient yardstick here as the two innovative occurrences of /r/ in Received Pronunciation, linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ (Gimson 1980:208f.) are not recognized orthographically and are not found in Irish English either.

This paper provides a detailed phonetic, synchronic description of the oral vowels of Upper Tanana, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska and the western Yukon Territory. Upper Tanana has, depending on the dialect, six or seven oral monophthongs that can be modified for (low) tone, nasalization, and length. Previous accounts are auditory. They disagree regarding the articulation of two of the vowels (which we represent as /ɘ/ and /ʌ/), and raise the question of whether ‘length’ indicates a quantity or a quality distinction. In contrast to earlier accounts, we provide acoustic measurements of F1, F2, and the duration of the vowels of two Alaskan dialects of Upper Tanana: Northway and Tetlin. We find that the phonetic realization of one of the vowels is quite different from the earlier auditory descriptions. For the other vowels and for the quantity distinction, our findings support earlier descriptions while supplying new details. Several co-articulation effects, previously undescribed, are also identified.

Studies of Welsh have generally relied upon traditional accounts of the phonetics of the language, in terms of descriptions of articulation with little reference to instrumental investigation (e.g. S. Jones, 1926; Morris-Jones, 1913; Arwyn Watkins, 1961; and most of the unpublished dialect studies presented as theses to the University of Wales). However, certain instrumental studies of Welsh phonetics do exist, although their number and range of topics is limited.

It is widely recognized that during the eighteenth century a sound change began in English concerning the consonant /r/. This change, referred to as “R dropping’ (Wells, 1982a: 218), involved the elision of /r/ in non-prevocalic positions.

Acquiring the skill of phonetic transcription from orthographic text is a widespread technique included in all undergraduate curricula for phonetics, linguistics and speech science. It is an ability which is also frequently expected in students of modern languages and English. Any instructor who has been faced with a pile of thirty and more transcriptions to mark knows what a laborious task this is, requiring a lot of close examination of fine detail. To be able to lighten the load by computerizing some of the detail of error-correcting is therefore seen as desirable from several points of view.

This brief study investigates the development of fundamental frequency (FO) in pre-adolescent children as a function of age and sex. The children who took part in the study were divided into three age groups: 6, 8 and 10 years. Each group consisted of three males and three females. Each subject produced nine target phrases with [] in phrase-final position, which were elicited via a picture-naming task. FO was estimated for the nine target utterances and the following FO parameters were derived: mean FO for the whole phrase; FO range for the whole phrase; standard deviation values of FO for the whole phrase and mean FO for the phrase-final vowel [α:]. Results indicated that FO parameters generally decreased with age, and by age 10 years the males had lower values than the females for all four parameters. Results also indicated that the mean standard deviation of FO across the phrase was significantly higher for the females compared to that for the males.

At the 1989 Kiel Convention of the IPA a sub-group was established to draw up recommendations for the transcription of disordered speech. The report produced at the Convention appeared in print in Duckworth, Hardcastle, Allen and Ball (1990), being mainly a list of symbols, termed ‘extensions to the IPA’, or ‘extIPA’ for short. Examples of the use of the extIPA symbols are given in Ball (1991), Howard (1993) and Ball, Code, Rahilly and Hazlett (1994) among others, and Ball (1993) includes them at textbook level. Various changes and additions to the original set of symbols are reported in Bernhardt and Ball (1993). These changes mean, however, there is a need for a listing of the current set of symbols, preferably in as concise a form as possible. There was also felt to be a need for the symbol set to receive overt recognition from a relevant society, therefore this publication marks the official adoption of the extIPA symbols by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA).