The Brahmin dialect of Tamil (Dravidian) has an unusual inventory of five distinctive liquid sounds: plain and retroflex rhotics, and plain and retroflex laterals, and a fifth liquid which has been variously described as a rhotic, a lateral, a glide and/or a fricative. This paper investigates the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual properties of these liquids, and, in particular, the fifth liquid. Electropalatography (EPG) and static palatography were used to examine the articulatory properties of the liquids, the acoustic properties of the liquids were examined, and we tested the intelligibility of the EPG recordings in a perception experiment. Our intent is to propose a classification for the fifth liquid based on these studies. The fifth liquid is classified as a retroflex central approximant, with characteristics that make it distinct from the other liquids along three dimensions of contrast: static ∼ dynamic, central ∼ lateral and retroflex ∼ non-retroflex.

Experimental work on Bulgarian speech rhythm has failed to determine which of the two “traditional” rhythmic categories the language belongs to. Using the model put forward by Dauer (1987), the present paper attempts to characterise the rhythm of Bulgarian in scalar rather than in dichotomous terms. For such an assessment, six of the components proposed by Dauer are relevant. Bulgarian is assigned two pluses (for intonation and function of accent), two zeros (for vowel duration and vowel quality) and two minuses (for syllable structure and consonant quality). According to the model, the more pluses a language has, the more likely it is that this language is “stress-timed”. From the relative rhythm “score” obtained for Bulgarian one can predict that, on a scale of rhythm, the language will occupy an intermediate position. This accounts for the contradictory conclusions reached in earlier studies. Dauer's model thus provides a useful starting point for a study of the rhythm of a given language, but it can be further improved, for example by adding zero marks for some of the components.

In the hope of provoking discussion, an attempt is made to combine articulatory, perceptual and acoustic considerations in relating the observed variants of R to one another. An underlying, and in itself debatable point of departure for the discussion is that is a universal non-lateral liquid from which all R variants ultimately stem.

The formants of the eleven monophthong vowels of Standard Southern British (SSB) pronunciation of English were measured for five male and five female BBC broadcasters whose speech was included in the MARSEC database. The measurements were made using linear-prediction-based formant tracks overlaid on digital spectrograms for an average of ten instances of each vowel for each speaker. These measurements were taken from connected speech, allowing comparison with previous formant values measured from citation words. It was found that the male vowels were significantly less peripheral in the measurements from connected speech than in measurements from citation words.

Assimilation phenomena involving lexical alveolars and velars are examined in a Stockport accent. It is suggested that the segment is too narrow a domain of investigation for clues to the differentiation of pairs such as leg kept and lead kept. The vowels either side of the consonantal sequence are involved in any kind of assimilation process that takes place, in many cases producing slight differences in dorsal contact between the alveolars and the velars.

Acoustic and electropalatographic data on the so-called Hiberno-English ‘slit-t’ are reported, and the implications these data have for an adequate transcription are discussed. Previous transcription suggestions highlight the difficulty posed by the lack of an IPA diacritic for tongue shape. We conclude that the adoption of an alveolar diacritic (as used in the extensions to the IPA for transcribing disordered speech) could get round these difficulties.