Three American English diphthongs involving onsets in the back of the vowel space were investigated by means of acoustic measurements, discriminant analysis, and perceptual experiments. These diphthongs, termed DOOR/WAR, TOY, and STAR, were observed in the speech of ten young women residing in southern Michigan. The diphthongs were elicited in a variety of /b/-, /ɡ/-, and /h/-initial words (e.g. board, Boyd, and barred). Words with similar consonantal margins but different nuclei (e.g. bode, baud, and bod) were elicited, as well. The DOOR/WAR and TOY words were compared with bode and baud (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/), while the STAR words were compared with baud and bod (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/). All three methods of investigation showed that the initial part of the DOOR/WAR and TOY diphthongs more closely resembles that of bode than baud. On the other hand, the initial part of the STAR diphthong was shown to be intermediate between that of baud and that of bod.

Any attempt to define and describe a non-native pronunciation of English is beset with a variety of difficulties. In the first place the researcher is dealing with something acquired, at least in part, by a conscious effort of the speaker. Although, as I have argued elsewhere (Jenner, 1984), English has a special status in the Netherlands, approximating to that of a second language in other countries, it is nonetheless true that the average Dutch learner has no opportunity for actual productive practice of the language until he is already 10 or 12 years old. His ears may be familiar with the sounds of native English, owing to the extensive use of English in Dutch television and cinema, but they are also conditioned by a much greater exposure to Dutch. His perceptual norms are Dutch. In the case of pronunciation this implies that the learner will initially perceive the phonological features of English with reference to the systems of Dutch, and will tend to interpret them as deviant surface exponents of underlying Dutch norms.

This issue of the Journal contains further contributions to the series ‘Illustrations of the IPA’. As in the case of previous contributions, the recordings accompanying them are available at http://web.uvic.ca/ling/ipa/handbook/. Illustrations published in the Journal prior to 1998 appear in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999). Later contributions will be incorporated into future editions of the Handbook.

This paper presents an acoustic study of the vowel system of Southern Ute, a Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southwestern Colorado. Previous auditory accounts proposed an inventory of five vowel phonemes that participate in three allophonic processes and contrast in length and stress. We investigate how the vowels are realized at the phonetic level by analyzing F1, F2, duration, spectral emphasis and f0 in over 6000 vowel tokens produced by eight fluent speakers (four female and four male). Our findings provide new phonetic detail for the earlier non-instrumental descriptions of the language, including both expected and previously unreported effects. We confirm the existence of five distinct phonemic categories but show that their prototypical phonetic realizations and positional allophones do not always match the earlier descriptions. We also describe how phonemic length and stress are marked in Southern Ute.

1.0 In the process of linguistic borrowing, when the model (the foreign word in the donor language) turns into the replica (the loanword in the borrowing language), adaptation takes place on several levels, and it proceeds according to the principles of languages in contact. In the course of this adaptation two basic laws operate: substitution and importation. The first law regulates the replacement of donor-language phonemes and morphemes which occur in the model by phonemes and morphemes of the borrowing language. Thus substitution takes place at the phonological and at the morphological level and may take several forms, depending on the nature and type of replacement.

A. J. Ellis's encyclopaedic work On Early English Pronunciation (henceforth EEP) now receives remarkably little serious attention from linguists. This has not always been the case. As long ago as 1877 Sweet hailed EEP as a ‘great work’ which ‘inaugurated the scientific historical study of English pronunciation.’ (viii) Other commentators admittedly have not been so complimentary. Wright, discussing the transcription of dialects in Part V of EEP, was prompted to write that ‘If his rendering … of other dialect speakers is as inaccurate as that of the Windhill dialect, the value of these tests for phonetic and philological purposes is not very great.’ (1892: 174) Orton (1949) found the work ‘defective and unreliable’. Dieth (1946) was equally critical.

In a recent paper J. D. McClure (1972) objects to some basic principles of the IPA vowel system. According to him neither the division of the cardinal vowels into ‘primaries’ and ‘secondaries’, nor the mixing of rounded and unrounded in each of these two sets of vowels can be justified. It is obvious that McClure is perfectly right although he argues perhaps slightly more vigorously than needed. As a matter of fact, one wonders if anybody would wish to object to the points he is making.

The purpose of this investigation is to analyse the place of articulation of anterior nasal versus oral stops in Croatian. Although there is agreement that placement for /n/ and /td/ is in the anterior region, there is disagreement among different authors about the precise place of articulation for these sounds. Some authors view these targets as sharing identical placement while others view placement of /n/ as more posterior to /td/. In this paper we use electropalatography (EPG) to investigate whether placement for these sounds is the same or different. The speech of six participants was recorded for the purposes of this study. The speech material consisted of 972 VCV sequences (V = /iau/, C = /ntd/). Four EPG indices were analysed: the ACoG measure, the amount of contact at dental and alveolar articulatory zones (dentoalveolar articulation being inferred indirectly), incomplete EPG closures and the lateral contact measure. Coarticulatory effects of vowels on placement were also measured. The results showed that /ntd/ generally shared the place of articulation in the dentoalveolar region, but also that relating quantitative physiological data to specific places of articulation should be done cautiously, taking into account variability in individual productions. The analyses also showed that /n/ had more incomplete EPG closures and a significantly lower amount of lateral contact when compared with /t/ and /d/. The nasal was more variable and showed less coarticulatory resistance in different vowel contexts than /t/ and /d/. The results of this study are discussed in terms of existing descriptions of Croatian consonant system and in light of cross-linguistic findings.

This paper examines double articulations in three African languages, Mamvu, Lese and Efe, all belonging to the Central Sudanic language family. The phonetic inventory of these languages exhibits some very interesting facts, among which the most striking are voiceless labial velar stops with double bursts, and a labial uvular stop which shows the combination of a voiceless and a voiced part in the same consonant. Acoustic and aerodynamic measurements describing the production of these sounds are presented.

One of the major non-native accents of English is what for convenience of reference we shall call Panjabi English (PE)—the English spoken by educated Panjabi speakers (for Panjabi see Gill & Gleason, 1962). This accent has assumed a certain importance over the last two decades because of the settlement of a large number of Panjabi speakers from India and Pakistan in various English-speaking countries, chiefly Britain. Nevertheless, it has not attracted much attention from the linguist. One possible reason for this neglect is that many linguists hold the view that there can be no ‘system’ in a non-native variety of a language, which, they may contend, is the result of an attempt to imitate, with varying degrees of inefficiency, some native variety of the language (though now at several generations' remove).

IPAtranscriptor is a tool for creating narrow phonetic transcriptions. As it connects to the computer's default text-to-speech engine on demand, the program can be used not only by sighted but also by partially sighted and blind individuals. Sighted users can choose whether they prefer the mouse or the keyboard as their input device. In contrast to other programs, the full set of symbols and diacritics of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is implemented and users can produce very narrow phonetic transcriptions as they can insert up to three diacritics above and three diacritics below each IPA symbol to modify it. Furthermore, the program can facilitate the collaboration between blind and sighted phoneticians (or students of linguistics in general) since they can easily exchange their phonetic transcriptions. A conversion of the transcriptions is not necessary as all transcribers can use the same system regardless of their visual abilities. IPAtranscriptor is freely available online and is believed to be the first audio-based program for narrow phonetic transcription that can be used by blind and sighted phoneticians.