Recent acoustic studies have provided evidence that /u/ (goose) and /ʊ/ (foot) have fronted in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years, but what is less clear is whether this fronting is due entirely to a repositioning of the tongue or whether it has been accompanied by an unrounding of the lips. Four experiments were carried out to shed light on this issue. An acoustic study of anticipatory coarticulation in /s/ in the first of these suggested a similar degree of lip-protrusion for young speakers whose F2 of /u/ was raised compared with that of older speakers. Compatibly, judgments of lip-rounding elicited from cross-dubbed auditory-visual stimuli and an analysis of lip movement showed young speakers' /u/ to be produced with rounded lips. Their tongue positions and movements in the final experiment were found to be almost as advanced for /u/ as for /i/ (fleece) and nearer to a central position for lax /ʊ/ (foot). Taken together, these results confirm firstly, that the diachronic shift in /u/ has involved a realignment of the tongue, but not of the lips; and secondly, that the diachronic shift in /ʊ/ is likely to be a more recent innovation than that of its tense counterpart.

The Welsh language has a complex vowel inventory with up to thirteen monophthongs and the same number of diphthongs. According to descriptive reports, systematic differences are found between the two main varieties of Welsh, Northern and Southern Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001, Jones 1984). However, few studies have attempted to verify these claims instrumentally, and little is known about the acoustic properties of Welsh vowels. The present study is the first systematic acoustic investigation of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Northern and Southern Welsh and includes measurements of formant trajectory length and spectral rate of change for the diphthongs (Fox & Jacewicz 2009).

The results largely confirm claims about contrastive vowel categories in Northern and Southern Welsh. In contrast to auditory-based accounts, however, pairs of Northern Welsh vowels were found to differ, not only in terms of duration, but also vowel quality. The diphthongs, in turn, revealed interesting cross-dialectal differences in spectral dynamics across their trajectories. The results have implications for notions of contrastivity in languages with large vowel inventories.

Despite the current popularity of rhythm metrics, there has been relatively little work aimed at establishing their validity or reliability, important characteristics of any empirical measure. The current paper focuses on the stability, or temporal reliability, of rhythm metrics by establishing if they give consistent results for the same speakers, in the same task, on successive occasions. Four speakers of Southern British English were recorded reading ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage on three consecutive days. Results indicated that some measures correlate more highly across time than others, and the choice of a measure that is both reliable and valid is discussed. It is suggested that the metric that best fits these criteria is formulated in terms of the proportion of vowels within an utterance (%V).

For some speakers of English, realization of the fricative in the consonant cluster /stɹ/may be undergoing a sound change in progress. Previous reports suggest that /s/ is being realized as the postalveolar fricative [ʃ], with the approximant /ɹ/ as a possible trigger. Research in sociolinguistics also indicates that there may be various intermediate stages of the change, falling somewhere between a typical /ʃ/ and /s/. However, information about the precise phonetic characteristics of these novel variants is still sparse, and existing sociolinguistic studies have not compared speakers’ realization of /stɹ/ to their typical /s/ and /ʃ/ productions. This paper uses the acoustic measurement of spectral peak to compare ten English speakers’ productions of the onsets /ʃ/, /ʃɹ/, /stɹ/, and /s/. The findings suggest that the majority of tokens produced by these speakers fall within their normal range for /ʃ/, with only limited evidence of intermediate forms. It is proposed that spectral peak measurement seems to be a stable method for use in future research categorizing variants of /stɹ/. However, this should include comparison to subjects’ normal /ʃ/ productions.

This study investigates utterance-final pitch accents in declaratives in two contact languages (Catalan and Spanish) as produced by two groups of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals (Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant). It contributes to a growing body of research showing that bilinguals transfer the intonational patterns of their native language to their non-native language, and it provides a sociolinguistic profile of an intonational variable in a language contact situation. We also examine the interaction of native and non-native patterns within the performance of the bilinguals. Evidence is presented for the existence of a process of phonetic category assimilation of non-native pitch contrasts to native pitch contours, as well as for phonetic new-category formation in second language learning.

This paper provides a detailed phonetic, synchronic description of the oral vowels of Upper Tanana, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska and the western Yukon Territory. Upper Tanana has, depending on the dialect, six or seven oral monophthongs that can be modified for (low) tone, nasalization, and length. Previous accounts are auditory. They disagree regarding the articulation of two of the vowels (which we represent as /ɘ/ and /ʌ/), and raise the question of whether ‘length’ indicates a quantity or a quality distinction. In contrast to earlier accounts, we provide acoustic measurements of F1, F2, and the duration of the vowels of two Alaskan dialects of Upper Tanana: Northway and Tetlin. We find that the phonetic realization of one of the vowels is quite different from the earlier auditory descriptions. For the other vowels and for the quantity distinction, our findings support earlier descriptions while supplying new details. Several co-articulation effects, previously undescribed, are also identified.

Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial coronal consonants corresponding to the orthographic 〈t, ch, n, ñ, s, z, ll, y, l, r〉. As a control, the same data were collected from a single speaker of Peninsular Spanish from Madrid. As expected, the main distinction in both varieties was made between anterior and posterior coronal consonants ((denti-)alveolars vs. (alveolo-)palatals) and reflected the historical merger of the sounds represented by 〈s–z〉 and 〈ll–y〉. At the same time, the results revealed some consistent differences between the two varieties in the location of the constriction and the amount of linguopalatal contact for most coronal consonants. First, the coronal consonants produced by the Argentine speakers were overall considerably more fronted and more constricted than the corresponding consonants produced by the Cuban speakers. Second, 〈ll, y〉 were produced as a fronted alveolo-palatal fricative by the Argentine speakers, and as an approximant by the Cuban speakers. Inter-speaker variation was observed within the varieties in the articulation of some consonants, namely in the Argentine alveolo-palatal fricative and nasal (〈ll, y〉 and 〈ñ〉), and the Cuban alveolo-palatal affricate 〈ch〉.

San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz (Jalapa) Mazatec is unusual in possessing a three-way phonation contrast and three-way level tone contrast independent of phonation. This study investigates the acoustics of how phonation and tone interact in this language, and how such interactions are maintained across variables like speaker sex, vowel timecourse, and presence of aspiration in the onset. Using a large number of words from the recordings of Mazatec made by Paul Kirk and Peter Ladefoged in the 1980s and 1990s, the results of our acoustic and statistical analysis support the claim that spectral measures like H1-H2 and mid-range spectral measures like H1-A2 best distinguish each phonation type, though other measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence are important as well. This is true regardless of tone and speaker sex. The phonation type contrasts are strongest in the first third of the vowel and then weaken towards the end. Although the tone categories remain distinct from one another in terms of F0 throughout the vowel, for laryngealized phonation the tone contrast in F0 is partially lost in the initial third. Consistent with phonological work on languages that cross-classify tone and phonation type (i.e. ‘laryngeally complex’ languages, Silverman 1997), this study shows that the complex orthogonal three-way phonation and tone contrasts do remain acoustically distinct according to the measures studied, despite partial neutralizations in any given measure.

The production of an ejective fricative involves an aerodynamic dilemma. An ejective requires increased intraoral air pressure, while a fricative requires air to be continuously vented through a narrow constriction. This venting may defeat the pressure increase. Because ejectivity is realized by forming a complete oral closure, we hypothesize that complete closure (i.e. affrication) may also typify ejective fricatives in some languages. We test this hypothesis through an acoustic production experiment with speakers of Tigrinya. We find substantial evidence that Tigrinya /s’/ is commonly realized as [ts’] and comment on the plausibility of affrication as a general strategy for the realization of ejective fricatives.

This paper analyses clicks in naturally-occurring English conversation. It demonstrates that regardless of any paralinguistic functions clicks may undertake, their occurrence is orderly and systematic, and intimately tied to the interactional structure of talk. Specifically, clicks are shown to function alongside the phonetic parameters of pitch, articulatory segmental features and voice quality (and the sequential and lexical organisation of talk) to demarcate the onset of new and disjunctive sequences. The methodology employed combines (i) the sequential analysis techniques of Conversation Analysis with (ii) parametric impressionistic and instrumental phonetic investigations. A key feature of this methodology is the study of naturally-occurring conversation rather than intuited or laboratory speech data. The findings in this paper challenge the traditional view that clicks function only paralinguistically in English. They also highlight the fruitfulness of implementing phonetic investigations alongside interactional analyses since such an approach enables previously unobserved patterns in the phonetics-interaction interface to be identified.

The relative prominence of syllables is essential to the segmentation of speech and therefore a crucial component of language comprehension, acquisition and learning. Incorrect placement and marking of prominence in English by non-native speakers can lead to problems in comprehensibility. Because the English and French phonological systems are so different, especially in the domain of stress, this can cause serious difficulties for many French speakers learning English. Indeed, some authors have posited the existence of ‘stress deafness’ in certain individuals. I suggest that French and English native speakers listen differently for stress, attributing different importance to the acoustic cues of F0, duration, amplitude and formant structure. This study focuses on the relative importance of these four cues with both English and French stimuli for English and French native speakers, and the results support the hypothesis.

This paper presents electropalatography (EPG) data from two female speakers of Central Arrernte, a language with six places of articulation, including four coronal contrasts. Both speakers were recorded reading the same list of words using two different types of artificial palate: the standard Reading palate, and the new Articulate palate. Data are presented from seventeen lingual consonants of this language. It is suggested that since the Articulate palate provides more coverage of the velar and dental regions, it may be able to better capture the crucial laminal and apical distinctions that exist in Australian languages such as Central Arrernte. However, caution is advised in interpreting the results from the two different types of artificial palate, since for many consonants, palatograms as well as values for standard analysis measures differ greatly between the two palate types.

Approximants that can be considered weaker versions of voiced fricatives (termed here ‘frictionless continuants’) are poorly served by the IPA in terms of symbolization as compared to semi-vowel approximants. In this paper we survey the central approximants and the symbols and diacritics used to transcribe them; we focus on evidence for the use of non-rhotic frictionless continuants in both natural language (by which we mean non-clinical varieties) and disordered speech; and we suggest some possible unitary symbols for those that currently require the use of a hard-to-read lowering diacritic beneath the symbol for the corresponding voiced fricative.

In the paper ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’, Martin Ball and Joan Rahilly approach an interesting problem – the phonetic transcription of approximants other than the so-called semivowels. In the absence of special symbols in the IPA chart, they suggest that special characters should be used for the notation of approximant realizations made at the bilabial, dental, alveolar, lamino-postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular and pharyngeal places of articulation. In their view, the introduction of new symbols should render those sounds comparable to other non-semivowel approximants for which special symbols are available, i.e., [ʋ] (labiodental), [ɹ] (apico-postalveolar) and [ɻ] (retroflex), while, at the same time, avoiding having to add the lowered diacritic to the voiced fricative symbols [β ð z ʒ ʁ ʕ].

The Judeo-Spanish speaking population of Istanbul is the result of migrations that were due to the edict of expulsion of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Ottoman ruler Bayezid II provided a haven to the exiles in his realm, and many came as immigrants to the capital Istanbul and other major port cities in that year. A continuous trickle of immigration of Jews originating in Spain continued after that date, as some of those who had gone to exile in other Mediterranean and Western European countries eventually also decided to resettle in Ottoman cities. Some Spanish-speaking families continued to migrate from the cities of the Italian peninsula to Istanbul and other centers of the Ottoman empire up until the eighteenth century. Another stream included Hispano-Portuguese families, Jews who had resettled in Portugal after the expulsion but were forced to undergo conversion there in 1497, and after a period of clandestine Jewish existence started emigrating to other countries in the sixteenth century. First Bayonne in France, then Amsterdam and other Hanseatic cities became important centers for Hispano-Portuguese families that returned to Judaism, and these maintained relations with, and occasionally sent immigrants to, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman cities.

Kumzari is an endangered language spoken by about 4000 people in Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Speakers of the main dialect are found on the Musandam Peninsula of Oman and in small groups in cities along the Gulf coast of the United Arab Emirates. Laraki, a closely related dialect of the language, is spoken across the Strait of Hormuz by a single community on Larak Island in Iran (Lewis 2011, Anonby & Yousefian in press).