Electropalatographic data on the frequency of occurrence of assimilatory processes in Catalan C1##C2 sequences, where ## is inserted at the boundary between two consecutive words, reveal that regressive place assimilations operate more often on C1 = /n/ than on C1 = /t/ and are triggered by /ɡ/ rather than by the labials /pbm/ and the voiceless velar stop /k/. Regressive manner assimilations involving nasality and laterality are facilitated by homorganicity between the two consecutive consonants and thus apply more frequently in the clusters /pmtntltʎ/, where C1 and C2 share the same labial or dentoalveolar place of articulation, than in the sequences /pntmkmkn/, where the two consonants are heterorganic; on the other hand, /k/ is less prone than /pt/ to become nasal when followed by /mn/. Place assimilatory processes apply more often for some speakers than for others, and their frequency of occurrence increases whenever C1 is embedded in a frequent or function word. The articulatory motivation for some of these place and manner assimilatory processes, and the extent to which they are complete or partial, are also investigated.

There is no standard phonetically balanced short passage for Portuguese research and clinical practice. This paper presents results of a novel analysis of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage that aims to determine if it is phonetically balanced for European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on new transcriptions resulting from algorithms developed for grapheme–phone transcription in these two varieties of Portuguese. These algorithms (based on standard EP and São Paulo BP varieties) are the same as those used to collect the frequency data, which is central to determining if a text is phonetically balanced. Results showed that neither transcription violates phonotactic rules, i.e. permissible combinations of speech sounds. The NWS is not phonetically balanced for BP if the phonemes are considered individually but is evenly distributed in terms of manner of articulation. The EP version of the NWS passage is a phonetically balanced text for EP.

Central Catalan ‘prepalatal’ (postalveolar) consonants show a complex phonological distribution. Whereas in word-internal intervocalic position a four-way opposition obtains, involving a contrast in voice and a fricative/affricate distinction, elsewhere at least one of the two oppositions is neutralized. Position in word determines whether affrication and/or voicing is contrastive. We study the effect of this factor as well as other phonetic factors and style on the allophony of the voiced prepalatals in a large corpus of Central Catalan. The most significant conditioning factor turns out to be the preceding context, whereas position in word per se is not significant either for degree of constriction or for voicing. Thus, we do not find a direct effect of phonological contrastiveness on phonetic variation.

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.

In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in f0, intensity, duration, F1, and spectral measures compared to unstressed vowels, but a linear discriminant analysis suggests f0 and duration are the best cues for discriminating vowels with primary stress from unstressed vowels. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly marked by differences in f0 relative to unstressed vowels. With regard to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowels are higher in the vowel space (have lower F1) when unstressed. Moreover, there is no reduction in the overall size of the vowel space. We interpret this pattern as evidence that unstressed vowels in Tongan are not prone to centralization, vowel reduction, or undershoot. The results, however, are consistent with a sonority expansion account (Beckman, Edwards & Fletcher 1992), whereby stressed vowels are lowered to enhance sonority.

This study examined native language (L1) transfer effects on the production of second-language (L2) prosody by intermediate Greek learners of English, specifically the set of tonal events and their alignment, speech rate, pitch span and pitch level in English polar questions. Greek uses an L* L+H- L% melody giving rise to a low–high–low f0 contour at the end of the polar question that does not resemble any of the contours used by native speakers in English polar questions. The results showed that the Greek speakers transferred the full set of Greek tonal events into English associating them with stressed syllables, and consistently placed the focus on the verb. The Greek speakers also anchored the peak of the phrase accent in polar questions around the midpoint of the stressed vowel across L1/L2 despite using longer vowel durations in L2. At the same time, their productions deviated from L1 forms in terms of speech rate (slower in L2), pitch span (narrower in L2) and pitch level (lower in L2), indicating that even when learners adopt an L1 prosodic feature in their L2, they still produce interlanguage forms that deviate from L1.

Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a greater degree of carryover than anticipatory nasalization. Nasality in carryover contexts is nonetheless restricted: the oral–nasal contrast is neutralized for high back vowels in this context and realized for three of the six speakers in low vowels. In the absence of nasal consonant context, contrastive vowel nasalization is generally greatest late in the vowel. Low nasal vowels in carryover contexts parallel this pattern (despite the location of the nasal consonant before the vowel), and low nasal vowels in anticipatory contexts are most nasal at the start of the vowel. We relate the synchronic patterns of coarticulation in Lakota to both its system of contrast and diachronic processes in the evolution of nasality in Lakota. These data reflect that coarticulatory patterns, as well as contrastive patterns, are grammatical and controlled by speakers.

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.

The Ersu language (/-xò/, 尔苏语 ěrsūyǔ, ISO-639 code ers) is spoken by approximately 16,800 people who reside in five counties in Sichuan Province (四川省) in the People's Republic of China: (i) Ganluo (甘洛县), and (ii) Yuexi (越西县) counties of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture (凉山彝族自治州), (iii) Shimian (石棉县) and (iv) Hanyuan (汉源县) counties of Ya’an Municipality (雅安市), and (iv) Jiulong (九龙县, Written Tibetan, hereafter WT brgyad zur) county of Ganzi (甘孜, WT dkar mdzes) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Ersu has two closely related sister languages: Lizu (/li55-zu55-hũ55/ or /ly55-zu55-hũ55/, 里汝语 lǐrǔyǔ or 栗苏语 lìsūyǔ) and Duoxu (/do33-ɕu33-na31/, 多续语 duōxùyǔ or 多须语 duōxūyǔ). Lizu is spoken in the neighbouring counties of (i) Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县, WT smi li rang skyong rdzong), (ii) Mianning (冕宁县), and (iii) Jiulong; whereas Duoxu is spoken in the county of Mianning, all in Sichuan province (see the map in Figure 1).

Bemba (also called Cibemba or Icibemba; ISO 639-3 code bem) is a Niger-Congo language belonging to the Central Narrow Bantu branch (Zone M in Guthrie's 1948, 1967–71 classification). Bemba is spoken in Zambia (mainly in the Northern, Luapula and Copperbelt provinces) and the Southern Democratic Republic of Congo by approximately 3.3 million speakers (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013). Our data are based on Bemba spoken in Zambia.

Basaá [ɓàsː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis 2009). Basaá is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classified as A43 (Guthrie 1967–71, A43a in Maho 2009). The ISO code of Basaá is bas (Lewis 2009).

Ika is a dialect of the Igbo language spoken in Ika South and Ika North East Local Government Areas of Delta State and the Igbanke area of Edo State in Nigeria. It belongs to the Niger Igbo cluster of dialects (Ikekeonwu 1986) spoken in areas bordering the west of the River Niger; Nwaozuzu (2008) refers to these dialects as West Niger Group of Dialects. A word list of Ika, written by Williamson (1968), was one of the earliest works on Ika and she points out in that work that Ika (and Ukwuani), though regarded as dialects of Igbo, are treated as separate on purely linguistic grounds. Ika phonology differs from that of Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects and this is why the study of Ika has been of major interest to Igbo linguists in recent years. There have been moves to grant Ika a language status, as seen in the assignment of a unique reference code to Ika: the ISO language code for Ika is ISO 639–3 ikk while that for Igbo is ISO 639–3 ibo. Standard Igbo has the same consonants as Ika though the latter has two consonants, /ʃ/and/ʒ/, which do not exist in the Standard dialect. However, the vocalic system of Ika is largely different from that of Standard and some Igbo dialects which have eight vowels. Ika has a nine-vowel system which includes the schwa, which is a variant of some vowels. Furthermore, it has nine nasal vowels; Standard Igbo and other dialects of Igbo have no nasal vowels. Ika manifests intonation in addition to lexical tone. Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects do not manifest intonation in the same way as Ika does; that is, they do not express attitudes and emotions through intonation. They manifest only lexical tone. In an earlier study of Northern Igbo dialects, Ikekeonwu (1986) could only discover the existence of upstep in Abakaliki dialect. Okorji (1991) and Egbeji (1999) have studied the intonation of Umuchu, an inland West dialect of Igbo. Their findings, particularly Egbeji’s, show that a declarative sentence can be changed to an interrogative one (repetitive question) by use of intonation. This is a syntactic function which can also be likened to what happens in Standard and most other Igbo dialects where the tone of the pronominal subject changes from high to low in the indication of interrogation. At present, therefore, there appears to be no evidence that attitudes and emotions can be expressed through intonation in Umuchu and other Igbo dialects as is observed in Ika.