This paper focuses on two types of voiceless nasal sounds in Xumi, a Tibeto-Burman language: (i) the voiceless aspirated nasals // [] and // [], and (ii) the voiceless nasal glottal fricative []. We provide a synchronic description of these two types of sounds, and explore their similarities and differences. Xumi voiceless nasal consonants are described with reference to the voiceless nasal consonants // and // in Burmese and Kham Tibetan because Burmese voiceless nasals are the best described type of voiceless nasals, and are therefore used as a reference point for comparison; voiceless nasals in Kham Tibetan, which is in close contact with Xumi, represent a characteristic regional feature. The synchronic description is based on acoustic and aerodynamic measurements (the total duration of the target phonemes, the duration of the voiced period during the target phonemes, mean nasal and oral flow). Our study (i) contributes to a better understanding of voiceless nasals as a type of sound, (ii) provides a first-ever instrumental description (acoustic and aerodynamic) of the voiceless nasal glottal fricative [], as attested in a number of Tibeto-Burman languages of Southwest China, and (iii) suggests a possible phonetic basis for the observed dialectal and diachronic variation between voiceless nasals and [] in some Tibeto-Burman languages.

Click consonants are well known for lacking allophonic variation. This lack of variation has been attributed to the existence of articulatory constraints on the coronal constrictions that are imposed by the existence of a second dorsal constriction. The current study investigates temporal acoustic differences among the four contrastive coronal click types in the /i/ and /u/ contexts in Mangetti Dune !Xung. Clicks have been described as being either non-affricated or affricated. However, when vowel context is taken into consideration, the typology is more complex. The alveolar click is non-affricated in both vowel contexts. The dental and lateral clicks are fricated in both contexts. The palatal click in the /i/ context has two clear anterior and posterior transients, followed by palatal frication, while in the /u/ context it is non-affricated. Results are consistent with an analysis of the palatal click in the /i/ context as involving allophonic secondary palatalization. There are trading relations between the duration of the click burst, frication noise and aspiration noise phases. Results have implications for understanding the synchronic and diachronic phonology of click consonants.

This paper examines the phonetic realization of rising pre-nuclear pitch accents in Persian. In a first experiment, the alignment of f0 valleys and peaks in pre-nuclear pitch accents was analyzed in controlled speech materials as a function of the syllable structure (open vs. closed) and vowel type (short vs. long) of the accented syllable. The results revealed that in words with antepenultimate stress, both the L and the H tones are anchored to specific segmental landmarks irrespective of syllable structure or vowel type. In particular, the L is consistently aligned with the onset of the accented syllable, and the H is placed with similar consistency in the vicinity of the first post-accentual vowel. In a second experiment, the variability in the timing and scaling of L valleys and H peaks was examined as a function of the proximity of the word boundary and of the following accent. The results revealed that while the alignment of the L was unaffected by changes in stress conditions, H peaks were significantly retracted as the syllable approached the end of the word. However, the proximity of the following accent did not produce a significant effect on H alignment. In addition, no significant differences were found on L and H scaling in different stress or tonal crowding conditions. Overall, the results contribute to a growing body of evidence that in the absence of upcoming prosodic pressure, the alignment of pitch targets is specified relative to segmental positions. A comparison between these findings and empirical findings from other languages reveals fine phonetic differences of segmental anchoring that are less likely to be interpreted in terms of distinct association-based phonological representations, and suggests that some aspects of segmental anchoring need to be explained in terms of continuous language-specific alignment rules.

This paper examines potential prosodic cues for level of formality in Japanese conversational speech using speech data gathered via one-on-one interviews. Based on previous work on the phonetic properties of formality in Japanese (Ofuka et al. 2000, Ito 2002), further studies of Korean (Winter & Grawunder 2012) and Catalan Spanish (Hübscher, Borràs-Comes & Prieto 2017), and on a lab-based pilot study, the study examined properties of f0, intensity, pause frequency, and articulation rate via mixed effects regression models and a functional data analysis (Grabe, Kochanski & Coleman 2007, Ramsay 2006). Analysis of the speech data shows significant relationships between a number of prosodic variables and level of formality, and suggests that some of these relationships may apply cross-linguistically.

The present study aims to document the developmental profile of static and dynamic acoustic features of vowel productions in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six years in comparison to adults. Twenty-nine monolingual Mandarin children and 12 native Mandarin adults were recorded producing ten Mandarin disyllabic words containing five monophthongal vowel phonemes /a i u y ɤ/. F1 and F2 values were measured at five equidistant temporal locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% points of the vowel's duration) and normalized. Scatter plots showed clear separations between vowel categories although the size of individual vowel categories exhibited a decreasing trend as the age increased. This indicates that speakers as young as three years old could separate these five Mandarin vowels in the acoustic space but they were still refining the acoustic properties of their vowel production as they matured. Although the tested vowels were monophthongs, they were still characterized by distinctive formant movement patterns. Mandarin children generally demonstrated formant movement patterns comparable to those of adult speakers. However, children still showed positional variation and differed from adults in the magnitudes of spectral change for certain vowels. This indicates that vowel development is a long-term process which extends beyond three years of age.

The present study aims to approach soft ‘g’, a highly disputable sound in Turkish phonetics and phonology, from a multidimensional perspective by (i) analysing its historical development, (ii) investigating its distribution in a dictionary of Modern Turkish, and (iii) studying its acoustic realization. In the Ottoman script soft ‘g’ was represented with two letters: <غ>, pronounced [ɣ], was used in the context of preceding back vowels Vback_(Vback, C); <گ>, pronounced [j], was used in the context of preceding front vowels Vfront_(Vfront, C). In 1928, due to a reform in orthography, these two vocalic contexts were obscured by replacing both <غ> and <گ> with <ğ>. Our investigation of the distribution of /ğ/ in the native vocabulary of Modern Turkish reveals that /ğ/ is in complementary distribution with /ɡ/: /ğ/ appears word-finally and word-medially (i.e. syllable-finally Vğ.C and intervocalically V.ğV), while /ɡ/ is found word-initially and word-medially (i.e. syllable-initially when following a consonant C.ğV). However, in loan words which are well assimilated into Turkish by means of phono-morphological rules the complementary distribution is not attested. Moreover, the behavior of soft ‘g’ in phonological processes strongly suggests that the sound is part of the phonemic inventory of Turkish. Finally, the results of our two acoustic experiments show that /ğ/ is phonetically manifested in the lengthening of the preceding vowel (/Vğ/ → [Vː]) independently of the surrounding vowel environment, word position, and participant age. In addition, the results indicate that speakers of Modern Turkish do not realize acoustic properties of a velar gesture.

This article examines first to second language (L1-to-L2) phonetic transfer in the speech of ten Occitan–French bilinguals, focusing on the mid-vowels in each of their languages. Investigating transfer in a situation of long-term societal language contact aims to shed light on the emergence of regional French phonological features from contact with Occitan. Using a sociophonetic methodology, the concept of equivalence classification (Flege 1988) is investigated, that is, that L2 words will be (initially) decomposed into familiar L2 sound categories, causing L1 and L2 sounds to resemble each other phonetically. The consequences of language contact are modelled statistically using an original corpus of over 1200 vowel tokens. The findings show that equivalence classification may not lead to equated sounds coming to resemble each other phonetically, suggesting necessary revisions to the speech learning model (SLM) hypothesis, and the need to consider the influence of sociolinguistic factors in situations of long-term language contact is emphasised.

Among phoneticians, the Vocal Profile Analysis (VPA) is one of the most widely used methods for the componential assessment of voice quality. Whether the ultimate goal of the VPA evaluation is the comparative description of languages or the characterization of an individual speaker, the VPA protocol shows great potential for different research areas of speech communication. However, its use is not without practical difficulties. Despite these, methodological studies aimed at explaining where, when and why issues arise during the perceptual assessment process are rare. In this paper we describe the methodological stages through which three analysts evaluated the voices of 99 Standard Southern British English male speakers, rated their voices using the VPA scheme, discussed inter-rater disagreements, and eventually produced an agreed version of VPA scores. These scores were then used to assess correlations between settings. We show that it is possible to reach a good degree of inter-rater agreement, provided that several calibration and training sessions are conducted. We further conclude that the perceptual assessment of voice quality using the VPA scheme is an essential tool in fields such as forensic phonetics but, foremost, that it can be adapted and modified to a range of research areas, and not necessarily limited to the evaluation of pathological voices in clinical settings.

This paper presents an experimental articulatory characterisation of lateral /l/ and nasal /n/ in Basque, using MRI midsagittal images. In order to assess previous observations of retroflexion or velarisation in these consonants in Basque, a battery of articulatory parameters is used which can be directly measured on the images. This set of parameters, focused on the description of the tongue shape and position, permits a fine-grained characterisation of the articulation of the two consonants under study, indicating the possible existence of a double articulation pattern in /l/ and, less clearly, in /n/. The results help to compensate for the lack of experimental descriptions on the articulation of Basque.

Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002, Jaeger & Hoole 2011). The lack of comparable instrumental studies for French may be due to the common assumption that the language lacks nasal place assimilation in general. We investigate here the production of French /n/+/k ɡ/ sequences via electropalatography. Four female speakers of European and Quebecois French wearing custom 62-electrode acrylic palates read the sentences C'est une bonne casquette ‘That's a good cap’ and C'est une bonne galette ‘That's a good tart/cookie’ alongside comparable control sentences involving /n/+/t d/ sequences. For each sequence, assimilation type was determined both qualitatively via visual inspection of the linguopalatal profiles and quantitatively using two contact indices. None of the /n/-tokens exhibited either categorical assimilation (i.e. [ŋk]) or lack of assimilation (i.e. [n(ə)k]). Rather, an intermediate pattern was attested with the nasal involving overlapped coronal and velar gestures ([nn͡ŋ]) and continuous retraction of the constriction. The degree of overlap varied among speakers, extending up to half of the nasal interval. Overall, these French patterns are strikingly different from the categorical processes reported for other Romance languages, yet similar to the gradient assimilation attested in Germanic languages. We conclude by discussing possible sources of these differences.

Saterland Frisian (Sfrs. Seeltersk) is the only living remnant of Old East Frisian. It is an endangered language, with an estimated number of 2250 speakers (Stellmacher 1998: 27) and is spoken in the municipality of the Saterland (Sfrs. Seelterlound), which is located in the federal state of Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.

This study focuses on a corpus assembled from commercial recordings of 1929 and 1932 featuring the two British linguists J. R. Firth (1890–1960) and Daniel Jones (1881–1967). The aim is to analyse and quantify differences in the Received Pronunciation (RP) used by the two men, in relation to sociolinguistic and stylistic variation within RP of the period. A systematic acoustic analysis reveals that whereas the vowel systems of the two speakers are closely similar in most respects, there are significant differences in the realizations of the trap, price and dress qualities. We show that each of these has a well-documented history of variation in RP, and find that in each case Firth is employing the higher-class or more prestigious variant, which is a reversal of expectations based on what is known about the social and regional origins of the two. We consider the possible roles of social background, avoidance of regional features and hypercorrection. The outcomes of our work are (i) an illustration of RP used in the interwar period for the purposes of teaching English as a foreign language, (ii) empirical evidence for internal variation within the accent, (iii) additional insights into the stylistic and social correlates of this variation, and (iv) a demonstration that satisfactory formant analyses can be conducted with recordings from as early as the 1920s. Overall, it is hoped that this case-study will both throw light on the ‘standard’ accent of the era and inspire further sociophonetic investigations with legacy recordings.

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).

Kumiai (Kumeyaay, formerly known as Diegueño; ISO code: DIH) is an endangered Yuman language of the Delta-California subgroup spoken across the Mexico–US border by approximately 150 people (Golla 2011). There are two major sets of Kumiai varieties: Northern Kumiai (Ipai/’Iipay) and Southern Kumiai (Tipai/Tiipay) (Golla 2011). A third cluster of varieties, located in southeastern San Diego County, is proposed in Langdon (1991) and Miller (2001). The speech illustrated below is representative of Ja’a, a Southern Kumiai dialect spoken in Juntas de Nejí, Baja California, Mexico (see Figure 1 below). There are currently only four fluent speakers of Ja’a Kumiai (Miller 2016b). Recordings were made over a six-month period with a 48-year-old female speaker born and raised in Juntas de Nejí. Quantitative data reported in this paper are taken from a subset of the current corpus, from recordings made with the speaker in a soundproof booth. Only the speech of this single speaker is reported here given the severe endangerment of the language.

Tianjin Mandarin is a member of the northern Mandarin Chinese family (ISO 693-3: [cmn]). It is spoken in the urban areas of the Tianjin Municipality (CN-12) in the People's Republic of China, which is about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Beijing. Existing studies on Tianjin Mandarin have focused mainly on its tonal aspects, especially its intriguing tone sandhi system, with few studies examining the segmental aspects (on tone, see e.g. Li & Liu 1985, Shi 1986, Liu 1993, Lu 1997, Wang & Jiang 1997, Chen 2000, Liu & Gao 2003, Ma 2005, Ma & Jia 2006, Zhang & Liu 2011, Li & Chen 2016; on segmental aspects, see e.g. Han 1993a, b; Wee, Yan & Chen 2005). As also noted in Wee et al. (2005), this is probably due to the similarity in segmental structures between Tianjin Mandarin and Standard Chinese, especially among speakers of the younger generation, and what differentiates the two Mandarin varieties is most notably their tonal systems. The aim of the present description is therefore to provide a systematic phonetic description of both segmental and tonal aspects of Tianjin Mandarin, with main focus on the tonal aspects.

Umbuygamu is a Pama-Nyungan language of the east coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Genetically, the language belongs to the Lamalamic subgroup (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997) of Paman languages, themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (as proposed by Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). Umbuygamu is the language of three clans at the southern end of Princess Charlotte Bay, about halfway up the east coast of Cape York Peninsula. Their estates are centred on a lagoon called Emanha (or Dinner Hole in English); they extend inland into the upper Running Creek system, and include the Cliff Islands group along the coast; see Rigsby 1992 for more details, and Verstraete & Rigsby (2015: 2) for a map of the region and its languages. Neighbouring languages are the Middle Paman language Umpithamu, along the coast to the north (see, for instance, Verstraete 2010, 2012) and two Lamalamic languages, Rimanggudinhma to the southwest (located inland; Godman 1993, Sommer 1999b), and Lamalama to the southeast (along the coast; Sommer 1999a).

Fataluku ([fataluku], ISO 639-3: ddg) is a language spoken by approximately 37,000 people on the eastern end of Timor-Leste (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016). Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, is an independent nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor in island Southeast Asia, which it shares politically with Indonesia in the west. Timor is located north of Australia, between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Bali in the west and New Guinea in the east.

Lisu (ISO 639-2 lis) is spoken by just over a million members of the group of this name in south-western China, north-eastern Burma, northern Thailand and north-eastern India. It formerly also had other names used by outsiders, including Yeren (Chinese yeren ‘wild people’), and Yawyin in Burma and Yobin in India (both derived from the Chinese term). Other names included Lisaw from the Shan and Thai name for the group, also seen in the former Burmese name Lishaw. About two-thirds of the speakers live in China, especially in north-western Yunnan Province, but also scattered elsewhere in Yunnan and Sichuan. About a quarter live in the Kachin State and the northern Shan State in Burma, with a substantial number in Chiangmai, Chiangrai and other provinces of Thailand, and a few thousand in Arunachal Pradesh in India. It is also spoken as a second language by many speakers of Nusu, Anung, Rawang and others in north-western Yunnan and northern Burma. Lisu has almost completely replaced Anung in China and is replacing Lemei in China. The Lisu are one of the 55 national minorities recognised in China, one of 135 ethnic groups recognised in Burma, a scheduled (officially listed and recognised) tribe in India, and one of the recognised hill tribe groups of Thailand. Figure 1 shows a map of the area where Lisu is spoken.

This paper focuses on the Japhug language (local name /kɯrɯ skɤt/) of Kamnyu village (/kɤmɲɯ/, Chinese Ganmuniao 干木鸟) in Gdongbrgyad area (/ʁdɯrɟɤt/, Chinese Longerjia 龙尔甲), Mbarkhams county (Chinese Maerkang 马尔康), Rngaba prefecture, Sichuan province, China. Japhug belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and is one of the four Rgyalrong languages, alongside Tshobdun, Zbu and Situ.