This paper looks at the phenomenon of ingressive speech, i.e. speech produced on a pulmonic ingressive airstream, set in the context of human and animal ingressive phonation. The literature on ingressive speech and phonation spanning several centuries is reviewed, as well as contemporary reports of their incidence and characteristics from both functional and acoustic perspectives. Ingressive phonation has been used as a deliberate means of speech or sound production for hundreds of years in order to achieve specific effects, and it is still used for the same purposes, by e.g. shamans and ventriloquists. In normal spoken conversation – contrary to what is often claimed – present-day ingressive speech is not limited to Scandinavia or Nordic languages, but is found on all continents, in genetically unrelated languages. Where ingressive speech occurs, it serves more or less the same paralinguistic functions, such as a feedback marker in a dialog. Since pulmonic ingressive phonation is also common in the calls of monkeys and apes, thus exhibiting a biological basis, it is suggested that ingressive speech might constitute a neglected universal phenomenon, rather than being highly marked, which is how it is commonly described in the literature.

Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during the production of German vowels for combined effects of stress, accent and corrective contrast. In order to identify strategies for vowel reduction independent of speaker-specific vocal-tract anatomies and individual biomechanical properties, an approach similar to the Generalized Procrustes Analysis was applied to formant spaces and lingual vowel target positions. The data basis consists of the German stressed and unstressed full vowels /iù ɪ yù ʏ eù ɛ ɛù φù œ aù a où ɔ uù ʊ/ from seven speakers recorded by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA). Speaker normalized articulatory and formant spaces gave evidence for a greater degree of coarticulation with the consonant context for unstressed vowels as compared to stressed vowels. However, only for tense vowels could spatial reduction patterns be attributed to vowel shortening, whereas lax vowels were reduced without shortening. The results are discussed in the light of current theories of vowel reduction, i.e. target undershoot, Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Prominence Alignment.

Research in the past few decades has shown that Northern Bizkaian Basque possesses a pitch-accent system of the Tokyo Japanese type, with a contrast between lexically accented and unaccented words. There is, however, a separate area of the Basque-speaking territory where we also find tonal accent phenomena: Western Navarre. In comparison with Northern Bizkaian, the Western Navarrese prosodic system has remained under-studied and ill-understood. In this paper, which focuses on the Western Navarrese Basque variety spoken in the town of Goizueta, we demonstrate that both stress and tone are lexically contrastive in this prosodic system. Words can be stressed on either the first or the second syllable of the stem and the stressed syllable is lexically specified as bearing one of two contours, in a way that is reminiscent of other European pitch-accent languages. We show that stress is consistently cued by both duration and relative intensity. Pitch contours are used for an independent contrast in accent type. The existence of contrastive tone in Western Navarrese Basque, in addition to contrastive stress, was not previously known. Basque may be one of the few languages where both Tokyo-type and Swedish-type lexical pitch-accent systems are concurrently attested and can still be phonetically and phonologically investigated.

In this article we examine the phonetic properties of labialization in Nuuchahnulth, a Southern Wakashan language spoken on Vancouver Island. Given the moribund status of this language, we make use of available archival materials from the early twentieth century along with more recent recordings in order to ascertain the exact nature of the process. Early work on this language was conducted by Edward Sapir, who transcribed data in a more or less phonetic form. A second goal of our paper is to test the accuracy of Sapir's transcriptions. Finally, we examine the characteristics of Nuuchahnulth labialization which mark it as an important typological phenomenon.

This study examines the discrimination of words ending with voiceless stops /p t k/ in first language (L1) and second language (L2) by three groups of native Thai participants. These participants differed in their countries of residence and experience with L2 English in the formal education system. The first group (T1) was a group of 18 Thai listeners who were living in Australia. The second and third groups consisted of 12 university students (T2) and 12 high-school students (T3) living in Thailand. Eighteen Australian English (AusE) listeners were included as controls. English and Thai words minimally contrasting in the final stop (e.g. ‘cap’ vs. ‘cat’) were presented to the listeners to investigate whether L2 phonetic learning occurs even for the contrasts that are expected to be discriminated with high accuracy from the onset of L2 learning and if so, how it is influenced by L2 experience. All three Thai groups showed reasonably accurate discrimination for both English and Thai words, but only T1 showed discrimination accuracy comparable to AusE in English. Further, only T3 was clearly more accurate in discriminating unreleased Thai than English stop contrasts, most of which were accompanied with release bursts. These two findings are taken to be evidence for phonetic learning of specific aspects of L2 contrasts rather than positive L1 transfer.

In Russian, the same consonant sequences are permitted in various phonotactic environments. The presence of a word boundary or reduced vowel can be phonologically contrastive, and both learners and experienced listeners may rely on fine acoustic cues to discriminate between phonotactic possibilities. In this study, durational characteristics of consonant sequences are examined to establish whether speakers use duration to distinguish (a) word-initial clusters (#C1C2), (b) consonant–schwa–consonant sequences (#C1əC2), and (c) sequences divided by a word boundary (C1#C2). Both monolingual native Russian speakers and bilingual Russian–English speakers produced several types of target sequences: stop+consonant, fricative+consonant, and nasal+consonant. Results show that C2 is significantly longer in C1#C2 than in other sequences. For #C1C2, when C1 is a stop, there is no significant difference in duration when compared with other sequence types, though C1s of other manners are significantly shorter. Differences in C1 burst duration for stops are consonant-specific, but a longer interconsonantal duration is a reliable cue to schwa presence in #C1əC2. These results are discussed with respect to their implications for gestural coordination, segmentation, and language learning.

The present discussion re-opens an old issue that was ‘officially discussed’ in Kiel in 1989 but has not been offered for debate in the wider phonetic community. It is argued that there is a logical and practical gap in the present IPA vowel chart. The lack of a central open vowel is unsatisfactory, in particular because more languages have a single open vowel with an apparently more central than fronted or backed quality. Arguments and suggestions for a number of alternative solutions to the problem are presented for discussion.

This study explores acoustic correlates to the singleton vs. geminate stop length contrast in Japanese. The proposal examined is that multiple acoustic features covary with the stop length distinction and that these features are available in the signal as potential secondary cues. The results support the proposal, revealing the presence of several acoustic features covarying with the singleton vs. geminate contrast in both durational and non-durational domains. Specifically, the preceding vowel is longer, the following vowel is shorter, there are greater fundamental frequency and intensity changes from the preceding to the following vowel, and there is evidence of more creakiness in voice quality for geminate than singleton consonants. It is also demonstrated that the vowel durations, as well as fundamental frequency and intensity changes have fairly strong categorization power.

The category of approximant sounds has been defined and redefined by leading phoneticians and recognized by the International Phonetic Association; nonetheless, within this class of sounds, semivowels, rhotic sonorants and other approximants such as [] are not clearly differentiated. In a recently-published study, Martínez-Celdrán (2004) proposes a new definition which considers approximants as a category composed of several subclasses of sounds. In this paper, an acoustic analysis of the approximants [] in Galician is presented. We will show that open and closed approximants, stops and fricatives present statistically significant differences both in duration and intensity, demonstrating the pertinence of the categorization postulated by Martínez-Celdrán.

Temporal lengthening of gestures and segments located in a boundary-adjacent syllable has been found in both pre- and postboundary contexts. However, the temporal extent or scope of this lengthening, particularly in the articulatory domain, is not well described. We address the question of scope of prosodic lengthening by considering specifically whether prominence interacts with boundary-related articulatory lengthening in such a way that prominent elements not immediately at a phrase edge are lengthened relative to the same prominent elements phrase-medially (i.e. at a considerable distance from a boundary). Articulatory kinematic data were collected for three subjects to analyze consonant constrictions of prominent syllables located (1) either immediately before or after a boundary and (2) two and three syllables away from that boundary. The results indicate that, as expected, gestures undergo prosodic lengthening when immediately local to the phase boundary. However, some subjects did display prosodic lengthening at a small remove from the boundary for a prominent syllable. This effect was strongest in the postboundary condition. These results suggest that a consideration of prominence may be relevant in understanding the temporal patterning of boundary-related articulatory lengthening.

Whistled speech is a complementary natural style of speech to be found in more than thirty languages of the world. This phenomenon, also called ‘whistled language’, enables distant communication amid the background noise of rural environments. Whistling is used as a sound source instead of vocal fold vibration. The resulting acoustic signal is characterised by a narrow band of frequencies encoding the words. Such a strong reduction of the frequency spectrum of the voice explains why whistled speech is language-specific, relying on selected salient key features of a given language. However, for a fluent whistler, a spoken sentence transposed into whistles remains highly intelligible in several languages, and whistled languages therefore represent a valuable source of information for phoneticians. This study is based on original data collected in seven different cultural communities or gathered during perceptual experiments which are described here. Whistling is first found to extend the strategy at play in shouted voice. Various whistled speech practices are then described using a new typology. A statistical analysis of whistled vowels in non-tonal languages is presented, as well as their categorisation by non-whistlers. The final discussion proposes that whistled vowels in non-tonal languages are a reflection of the perceptual integration of formant proximities in the spoken voice.

Yine [ˈjine] (previously known as Piro, ISO 639-3 = pib) is a Maipuran language (Payne 1991, Campbell 1997, Solís Fonseca 2003). See Payne (1991) and Campbell (1997) for discussion of the relationship of the Maipuran (or Maipurean) languages to the controversial Arawakan stock. There are approximately 3,000 speakers of Yine in the Peruvian Amazon. People in Brazil and Bolivia known as Manchineri (alternative spellings exist; ISO 639-3 = mpd) also speak a dialect of Yine (Urquía Sebastián 2006a).

Indonesian is an Austronesian language, closely related to Malay. Malay served as a lingua franca throughout the Malay Archipelago for centuries, and a variant of Malay was adopted as the official language of Indonesia when independence was declared in 1945. The variety described here is sometimes referred to as Standard Indonesian. Its autoglossonym is ‘Bahasa Indonesia’.

Kabiye is a Gur (Voltaic) language that belongs to the Eastern Grusi (also Gurunsi) sub-branch of Central Gur, which in turn sub-branches from Gur that is part of the greater Niger-Congo language family (Naden 1989: 147). The number of native Kabiye speakers is estimated at 730,000, with approximately 700,000 speakers living in Togo, 30,000 in Benin, and a very small number in Ghana (Grimes 2000: 242). The original homeland of the Kabiye people is in Northeastern Togo, with the region of Kozah serving as the community's cultural center. From the early 20th century, however, the community began to spread southward and now encompasses locations in the central and southern parts of Togo, as well as in the neighboring countries (Ali-Napo 1997: 20).