Chickasaw is a Muskogean language spoken in south-central Oklahoma. Published descriptions of Chickasaw phonetics include Munro & Willmond (1994), Munro (to appear), and Gordon et al. (2000). The following description is a summary of the principal phonetic aspects of Chickasaw drawn primarily from these works.

In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identifiable by listeners, but as part of the speech stream, it is usually easily identified and helps the listener to perceive and organize the spoken message as a whole. Thus, the variability of unaccented words is not random but must follow certain patterns determined by context. In this study, we take a closer look at the Finnish unaccented word-like construction niinku in spontaneous conversational speech samples collected from one female Finnish speaker. We provide an analysis of the phonetic variability of the niinku structure found in the data, including such properties as segmental duration, segmental make-up, and phonetic quality. We then show what kind of properties are common to all occurrences of this unaccented construction and discuss the conditions that probably govern its acoustic-phonetic quality.

Burmese is the official language of Burma. (In English, ‘Burmese’ and ‘Burma’ are also known as ‘Myanmar’, and ‘Rangoon’ as ‘Yangon’.) It is the major language of the Burmic branch of Tibeto-Burman, and is spoken natively by upwards of 30 million people in the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers, the central plain of Burma and the Irrawaddy Delta, and non-natively by up to another 10 million speakers of other languages in Burma.

Finnish talk-in-interaction is shown to use creak and glottal stops distinctively. Creak has turn-yielding functions, and glottal stops have turn-holding functions. Rather than either intuition or the use of large corpora with no attention to the interactional function in which the talk is embedded, the methodology used is that of interactional linguistics (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996 for a prosodic approach), which places emphasis on demonstrating participants' local orientation to linguistic categories within interactional sequences.

Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disfluencies (e.g. repetitions, repairs, filled pauses, false starts). This paper aims to promote ‘disfluency awareness’ especially in the field of phonetics –which has much to offer in the way of increasing our understanding of these phenomena. Two broad claims are made, based on analyses of disfluencies in different corpora of spontaneous American English speech. First, an Ecology Claim suggests that disfluencies are related to aspects of the speaking environments in which they arise. The claim is supported by evidence from task effects, location analyses, speaker effects and sociolinguistic effects. Second, an Acoustics Claim argues that disfluency has consequences for phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech that are not represented in the speech patterns of laboratory speech. Such effects include modifications in segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality and coarticulation patterns. The ecological and acoustic evidence provide insights about human language production in real-world contexts. Such evidence can also guide methods for the processing of spontaneous speech in automatic speech recognition applications.

The 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences will be held in Barcelona, August 3–9, 2003. ICPhS 2003 will be held under the auspices and sponsorship of the IPA. The first round of nominations to elect the first set of IPA representatives to the Permanent Council for the Organization of International Congresses of Phonetic Science will begin, together with the regular call for nominations to elect the IPA Council, starting in August 2002. For preliminary information on the Congress, please visit the ICPhS 2003 website at http://shylock.uab.es/icphs/

In the Illustration of Spokane<tf> by Barry Carlson and John Esling in JIPA 30, there was a misprint in the first line of page 97 in the name of the language and in the orthographic text on page 101. The Native name of the Spokane language is Npoqíniscn.