This paper aims to describe pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops in an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic. Our small-scale study investigates several acoustic parameters of Scottish Gaelic stop consonants designed to measure the duration and noisiness of aspiration of the stop in its immediate phonetic context. Our study expands on previous phonetic descriptions of phonemic (pre-)aspiration in three ways: firstly, we provide a more complete durational description of Scottish Gaelic than previous work in the literature; secondly, we apply a new measure, band-pass filtered zero crossing rate (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), in order to examine the noisiness of aspiration in addition to durational characteristics. The results from this measure are presented in tandem with durational results in order to assess its usefulness for future research. Thirdly, we consider the possibility of change in the Scottish Gaelic stop system by examining data from older and younger speakers. Results suggest that band-pass filtered zero crossing rate is a useful tool and should be considered in future research on aspiration. Also, durational and zero crossing results indicate that younger speakers have shorter and less noisy pre-aspiration than older speakers. We discuss these results as a possible sound change in progress.

Linguopalatal and sagittal vocal tract configuration data from a large number of languages reveal that the so-called palatal consonants (i.e. [ç ʎ c ɲ j]), as well as the vowel [i], are often realized simultaneously at the alveolar and palatal zones. Moreover, while some of these sound categories may also exhibit a palatal constriction ([ç c ɲ j i]), others are exclusively alveolar or alveolopalatal in line with the manner of articulation characteristics involved ([ʎ], also [ɕ] and [tʃ]). Consonants may favor one or more places of articulation and differ in fronting degree depending on the language taken into consideration; moreover, there appears to be a symmetry requirement by which consonants differing in manner, such as [c] and [ɲ], may agree in place. The data reported in this paper argue in favor of a revision of the articulatory classification of palatal consonants by the International Phonetic Alphabet involving their subdivision into two classes, an alveolopalatal and a palatal one.

This paper presents impressionistic, electroglottographic and acoustic data exploring the distribution of glottalic and pulmonic airstream in word-final Scottish English obstruents. We explore the relationship between these airstream mechanisms and aspirated or glottalised phonatory settings of individual speakers near this obstruent locus. We address the hypothesis that the tendency for pre-stop glottalisation found in some British English varieties can explain the occurrence of glottalically-released stops. This hypothesis suggests that ejectives would appear as an occasional artefact of mistimed glottalisation. We also investigate whether a glottalic airstream acts as a potential contrast enhancement mechanism, through association with /−voice/ as opposed to /+voice/ stops. We show that glottalisation and aspiration can readily co-occur in the same speaker, and that local phonatory setting (with glottalised or aspirated articulation) can be consistently used as a secondary correlate of obstruent /−voice/, in the context of stops and fricatives respectively. The results show that although glottalisation as a secondary correlate of /−voice/ stops often co-occurs with an ejective release, they are not necessarily bound together. These results argue against a simple epiphenomenal explanation for the appearance of ejective stops in English, while also showing that they are not (yet) a systematic phonological enhancement in this variety.

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of the intonational patterns of declarative questions and wh-questions produced by a group of young adults residing in a rural town of south-central Spain. Question intonation has been reported as highly variable across and within Spanish dialects; recent sociophonetic research on multiple languages suggests that intonational variation may be accounted for by speaking condition (i.e. speech style) in addition to other linguistic and social factors. This study is an initial attempt to examine the potential interactions between speaking condition (read speech vs. task-based dialogue) and social characteristics (speaker sex) on intonational variation. First, it is shown that 12 of the 16 speakers undergo at least one style-shift between speaking conditions; these data are captured in variationist terms, providing empirical assessments about formal and vernacular variants for the two sentence types in question. Second, it is shown that speaker sex differences play a role in style-shifting, and this leads to the hypothesis that variation in declarative questions may have developed as a marker of local identity for Manchego men. All in all, this study offers empirical support that the findings on sociophonetic variation warrant consideration in current models of speech production.

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.

While there is variation among existing impressionistic accounts where the description of the RP English LOT and THOUGHT vowels is concerned (compare Wells 1982 (vol. I), Collins & Mees 2003, Roach 2004, Cruttenden 2008), not much attention has been paid to this issue in acoustic studies of RP (e.g. Wells 1962, Deterding 1990, Hawkins & Midgley 2005). In the present study, seven female native speakers of RP or near-RP born between 1985 and 1993 (i.e. speakers aged between 18 and 25 years at the time of the study) were recorded saying English words containing monophthongal vowels. In addition, data consisting of read speech from 18 male native speakers of RP or near-RP born between 1983 and 1991 (i.e. speakers aged between 18 and 25 years at the time they were recorded) contained in the DyViS database (Nolan et al. 2009) were analysed. The data were analysed acoustically by measuring F1 and F2 and normalising the measurements according to Lobanov's (1971) formula along with the mean F1 and F2 frequencies reported in Wells (1962), Deterding (1990) and Hawkins & Midgley (2005). Statistical analysis revealed statistically significant differences between the F1 formant measurements of the seven female speakers and the 18 male speakers versus Hawkins & Midgley's speakers born between 1946 and 1951; mean F1 was higher for the speakers born between 1946 and 1951. As for the THOUGHT vowel, the F1 measurements overlapped with the means relating to all different age groups in Hawkins & Midgley's (2005) data. It is suggested that RP LOT is undergoing raising whereas there is no strong evidence of any shift of the THOUGHT vowel.

This paper investigates the relevance of three prosodic parameters (alignment, duration and scaling) in the conveyance of contrastive focus in Catalan, Italian and Spanish. In particular, we seek to determine how the Effort Code is instantiated in the expression of contrastive focus in both production and perception. According to the Effort Code, putting more effort into speech production will lead to greater articulatory precision (de Jong 1995, Gussenhoven 2004) and this is related to the expression of focus in the sense that wider pitch excursions will be used to signal meanings that are relevant from an informational point of view. A dual production and perception experiment based on an identification task was conducted. Results for the production part show that contrastive focus accents have earlier peaks for all three languages but f0 peaks are systematically lower only in Italian. Syllables bearing the contrastive focus accents are also longer in the three languages. Regarding the results for the perception part, converging evidence is found not only for an active perceptual use of the three prosodic parameters present in production but also for language-specific preferences for particular prosodic parameters.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-ŋk/ cluster (e.g. tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years.

Achieving voicing during fricatives is complex because voicing and frication require opposite production strategies that must be managed effectively at the supralaryngeal level. Previous research has suggested that there are differences in tongue-to-palate contact patterns that are conditioned by voicing. However, findings have been restricted to a single time point and have been generally inconclusive. This study used electropalatography (EPG) to investigate differences in the dynamics of contact in voiced and voiceless lingual fricatives. Participants were six typically speaking Croatian adults. The speech material consisted of symmetrical VCV sequences, where C was /s z ʃ ʒ/. EPG measures were taken throughout the fricatives and indices were used to quantify place of articulation (CoG), groove width and target configuration onset. The EPG measures showed similar results for voiced and voiceless fricatives during their central portions. However, there were notable differences at the periphery of the fricative period, the most significant being that the voiceless fricatives reached a stable period in terms of tongue placement and groove configuration later than the voiced fricatives. The results support aerodynamic evidence that voiced and voiceless fricatives differ in the onset and the offset of turbulence.

Mennonite Plautdietsch (ISO 639–3: pdt) is a West Germanic (Indo-European) language belonging to the Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch) subgroup of Eastern Low German (Ostniederdeutsch), a continuum of closely related varieties spoken in northern Poland until the Second World War (Ziesemer 1924, Mitzka 1930, Thiessen 1963). Although its genetic affiliation with these other, now-moribund Polish varieties is uncontested, Mennonite Plautdietsch represents an exceptional member of this grouping. It was adopted as the language of in-group communication by Mennonites escaping religious persecution in northwestern and central Europe during the mid-sixteenth century, and later accompanied these pacifist Anabaptist Christians over several successive generations of emigration and exile through Poland, Ukraine, and parts of the Russian Empire. As a result of this extensive migration history, Mennonite Plautdietsch is spoken today in diasporic speech communities on four continents and in over a dozen countries by an estimated 300,000 people, primarily descendants of these so-called Russian Mennonites (Epp 1993, Lewis 2009).

Clicks are known to occur in English conversation, and have traditionally been assumed to convey affective meaning, generally negative. This is indeed the lay interpretation of clicks. In this paper, we build on the work of Wright (2011a, b), who shows that clicks are also used in the management of sequences of talk. Firstly, we consider similarities and differences in the production of clicks and percussives. We consider some distributional properties of clicks in one variety of English. Drawing on a wide range of conversational data from Britain and the USA, we show some of the functions of clicks and percussives in conversation, which include stance-taking and sequence management (projection of a turn constructional unit and word-search), and handling aspects of timing between turns. We also consider some of the visual behaviours that may accompany clicks. The meaning or function of clicks and percussives, it is argued, must be considered in a fuller interactional context.

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.

Upper Saxon (Obersächsisch /ɵːpoˁˈsɛksʃ/) refers to a group of dialects spoken by over two million people in the Free State of Saxony in eastern Germany. It is considered one of the eastern branches of Central German (Wiesinger 1983, Lewis 2009), with major phonological, morphological, and lexical differences from Standard German and other regional dialects.

Luxembourgish (local language name: Lëtzebuergesch [ˈlətsəbuəjəʃ], French name: Luxembourgeois, German name: Luxemburgisch) is a small West-Germanic language mainly spoken in the multilingual speech community of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where it is one of the three official languages alongside German and French. Being the first language of most Luxembourgers it also has the status of the national language (since 1984). Although in its origin Luxembourgish has to be considered as a Central Franconian dialect, it is nowadays regarded by the speech community as a language of its own. As a consequence, German is considered a different language. An official orthographical system has been devised. Luxembourgish is used very frequently in day-to-day oral communication at all social levels; it is very common on local radio and television; it is the only language spoken in parliament sessions and it is also very often used at the workplace. Although the vocabulary of Luxembourgish has a substantial number of loan words from French and German, the morpho-syntax follows Germanic patterns. Luxembourgish today has approximately 400,000 speakers, including many L2 speakers (around 43% of the population does not have the Luxembourgish nationality).

This illustration focuses on the variety of Pashayi (also, Pashai) spoken in the Dara-i-Nur valley of Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (approximately, N 34.682 E 70.581); the ISO 639-3 code for this variety is psi. According to Lewis (2009) there are 54,400 speakers of this variety, and about 216,000 speakers of all Pashayi dialects. The most comprehensive published study of Pashayi to date is Morgernstierne's two-volume grammar (Morgenstierne 1973, 1944), which is helpfully summarized in Bashir (2003).

This study examines the potential of frequency of clicking (the production of velaric ingressive stops) as a possible basis for discriminating among speakers of English by forensic phoneticians. From analyses of clicking behavior among 100 young male speakers of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) recorded in two interactional tasks, it concludes that, contrary to the view of some forensic practitioners, the majority of speakers – of this language variety at least – do not vary sufficiently from one another in their rates of clicking for this feature to serve as a reliable discriminator. Further, speakers are generally not stable in their clicking behavior, either within or across interactions, and their rates of clicking may vary through accommodation to the click rates of their interlocutors. In view of these findings, it is suggested that the mere comparison of clicking rates across questioned and known recordings is unlikely to be of assistance to forensic phoneticians in the majority of forensic speaker comparison cases.