Australian English /t/ has a fricative realisation in some contexts. The presence of an additional surface fricative in the language raises questions about potential merger and the maintenance of contrasts. An orthographic representation of fricated /t/ as 〈sh〉 suggests a similarity to the existing fricative /ʃ/. This paper compares the acoustic characteristics of fricated realisations of /t/ in Australian English with those of /ʃ/ and /s/, the fricatives judged most likely to be acoustically similar. The findings suggest a great degree of similarity to /ʃ/ in terms of spectral measures, with duration being the most likely perceptual means of distinguishing fricated /t/ from /ʃ/.

This paper offers an analysis of Cuzco Quechua intonation using experimental techniques to examine one of the acoustic cues of pitch, the fundamental frequency or F0. While previous descriptions in the literature are based on auditory impression, in the present study recordings were made of read declaratives produced by native Quechua speakers in Cuzco, Peru. This paper provides an initial characterization of high and low tones with respect to the stressed syllable, as well as information regarding the height and alignment of these tones. In addition, the intonational marking of intermediate phrases within an utterance is discussed. Research on Quechua intonation can be used to begin to address several issues regarding the intonation of languages in contact, as well as to provide data for a future cross-linguistic analysis of indigenous language intonation features.

This study is an acoustic investigation of the nature and extent of consonant voicing of the stop /b/ in two dialectal varieties of American English spoken in south-central Wisconsin and western North Carolina. The stop /b/ occurred at the juncture of two words such as small bids, in a position between two voiced sonorants, i.e. the liquid /l/ and a vowel. Twenty women participated, ten representing the Wisconsin and ten the North Carolina variety, respectively. Significant dialectal differences were found in the voicing patterns. The Wisconsin stop closures were usually not fully voiced and terminated in a complete silence followed by a closure release whereas North Carolina speakers produced mostly fully voiced closures. Further dialectal differences included the proportion of closure voicing as a function of word emphasis. For Wisconsin speakers, the proportion of closure voicing was smallest when the word was emphasized and it was greatest in non-emphatic positions. For North Carolina speakers, the degree of word emphasis did not have an effect on the proportion of closure voicing. The results suggest different mechanisms by which closure voicing is maintained in these two dialects, pointing to active articulatory maneuvers in North Carolina speakers and passive in Wisconsin speakers.

The purpose of this study is to examine voice onset time as a phonetic correlate of voicing distinction in standard Persian. Issues pertinent to VOT are also addressed: namely, the effect of place of articulation, vowel context and sex of speakers. The VOTs were measured from recordings of five male and five female speakers reading 65 words that contained a full set of Persian oral stops in word initial and intervocalic positions. This acoustic experiment indicated that VOT distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops. The results also revealed that Persian uses mainly {voiceless unaspirated} and {voiceless aspirated} categories for [±voice] distinction in initial position and {voiced} and {voiceless aspirated} categories in intervocalic position. Vowel context also affected VOT values but the only significant difference was due to high vowels, which caused the preceding voiceless stop to have a longer VOT. Examining sex differences in the VOT values indicated that for voiced items females produced longer VOTs than males. However, voiceless items displayed no significant sex differences for VOT values. Fundamental frequency (F0) of the onset of the following vowel was also examined as another cue to voice distinction. Although the F0 values of voiceless tokens were higher than those of the voiced ones in each voiced–voiceless category, the results suggest that F0 is not a major cue distinguishing the two stop categories.

In the weeks following the publication, of our article ‘Do we need a symbol for a central open vowel?’ (Barry & Trouvain 2008), we received 12 personal communications commenting on and discussing the points we had made. Martin Ball has since published his discussion points in JIPA (Ball 2009), as has Daniel Recasens (Recasens 2009), who was not among the 12 who contacted us directly. Thus it would be fitting for us to summarize the points made by the 11 members whose opinions have not yet been made known to the rest of the IPA community and to refine our standpoint in the light of Recasens’ and Ball's comments.

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family and is closely related to Finnish. It has about one million native speakers in Estonia and about 150,000 elsewhere in the world. In phonetics, Estonian is probably best known for its three degrees of contrastive quantity: short (Q1), long (Q2) and overlong (Q3).

Nepali, a language of the Indo-Aryan family, is the official language of Nepal. According to the 2001 population census of Nepal, more than 11 million Nepalese (48.61% of the total population) claim this language as their mother tongue. It is also spoken in other countries of South Asia, such as India and Bhutan, as well as by members of the Nepalese Diaspora around the world. The population census of India of 1991 reported that more than two million Indians use Nepali as their mother tongue. Within Nepal, Nepali shows some dialectal variation mainly linked to geographical and socio-cultural factors. Nevertheless, the dialect called the ‘eastern’ dialect spoken by a majority of Nepali speakers shows rather little variation (Bandhu et al. 1971).

Palula is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the southern part of Chitral District in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. It belongs to a group of speech varieties subsumed under the heading Shina (Morgenstierne 1941; Strand 2000–2001). The speech described here is that of Ashret Valley, one of two main dialects of Palula. The transcription is based on a recording of the speech of the second author, Naseem Haider, himself a native speaker of Palula, born in 1978; his speech is typical of Ashreti, or southern, Palula.

RALPH L. VANDERSLICE, who contributed to many areas of phonetics, died on 24 August 2008, aged 78, in Portland, Oregon. He was born on 2 January 1930 in South Bend, Indiana. He received his B.A. and his M.Sc. in speech and theatre from Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in 1951 and 1954, respectively. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Vermont and Hawai'i. He moved to UCLA where, in 1968, he obtained his Ph.D. His dissertation, Synthetic Elocution (http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclaling/wpp/No8/), was an exploration of the character and some of the specifics of the rules that would be necessary to implement the prosodic aspects of synthesized speech produced by a reading machine. Peter Ladefoged was the chair of his dissertation committee and Victoria Fromkin one of the other members. While still a student at UCLA Ralph Vanderslice was an expert witness testifying against the validity of ‘voiceprints’ (the use of spectrographic displays of speech to identify suspects in criminal trials). He was very much a ‘hands-on’ person, skilled in many of the mechanical and electronic arts, one manifestation of this being his invention of the ‘crico-thyrometer’, a device that could track vertical larynx movement in connected speech. He subsequently taught at City University of New York and Yale University. He published many papers on speech prosody, notably ‘Binary suprasegmental features and transformational word-accentuation rules’ (1972, Language, with Peter Ladefoged). His colleagues, including this author, his office-mate in the UCLA Phonetics Lab, remember him for his erudition, wit, and generosity in helping others with everything from providing references to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on phonetics (which he was steeped in) to repairing a shorted circuit in an amplifier. His salutary influence continues.