Reports results of an instrumental acoustic examination of the vowel systems of ten Jamaican Creole (or Basilect-) dominant and nine Jamaican English (or Acrolect-) dominant speakers, and links phonetic features with sociolinguistic factors. Nature and relative role of vowel quantity and quality differences in phonemic contrast are considered.…

Studies palatization gestures in the production of /t/ and /d/ in standard Belgium French through the use of electropalatography. The articulatory results are compared with an acoustic study of the affricated realization of these consonants when followed by /i/, /y/, /j/, and /h/ in Quebec French. (Author/VWL)

Provides acoustic evidence that in the last 50 years New Zealand English (NZE) has undergone a substantial vowel shift. Two sets of data are studied: the Otago corpus, recorded in 1995, and the Mobile Unit Corpus, recorded in 1948. (Author/VWL)

Explored the extent to which a model of the acoustic consequences of overlapping, sliding consonantal and vocalic gestures was used to account for stress-induced changes in F2 trajectories occurring in test words embedded in a carrier phrase. Three stress conditions were studied including contrastive stress on test words, contrastive stress on the…

Argues that statistical analysis of the potential distinctiveness of near-merged contrastive pairs must simultaneously take into account several acoustical dimensions. Discriminant analysis of the speech of five Utah speakers distinguished near-merged contrasts but not homophones, suggesting that discriminant analysis is useful in assessing…

Explores the acoustic nature of Singapore English. In directly comparable samples of British and Singapore English, two types of acoustic measurements were taken--calculation of a variability index reflecting changes in vowel length over utterances, and measurements reflecting vowel quality. Findings provide acoustic data that support the…

Fricative spectral data are compared with articulatory data from electropalatographic (EPG) recordings in an investigation of coarticulatory effects on the acoustic signal. Data were taken from CV tokens produced by four female speakers of Australian English. Results are presented for coronal fricatives in seven monothong vowel contexts.…

Examined how acoustic variation affects second language (L2) lexical acquisition in consideration of four hypotheses: degraded input, elaborate processing, independent modulation, and robust versus strong connectivity. Beginners of L2 Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish words presented in 1 of 3 degrees of acoustic variation. Immediate and…

Discusses dialectal variation in the lexical tone system of Ma'ya, an Austronesian language featuring three lexically contrastive tonemes. Representative acoustic data were collected from the Missol, Slawati, and Laganyan dialects, and on the basis of these data, an account is given of their tone systems and of how these tone systems compare to…

Evidence from Warren County, North Carolina suggests a three-variant distinction for negative forms (i.e., wasn't, weren't, and won't). Throughout the history of sociological investigation, two types of variant have been noted: a sociolinguistic and a linguistic. In Warren County, "won't" functions as both types. (Author/VWL)

One characteristic of Japanese pitch accent is that there is the so-called "flat" accent, which has no fall or nucleus. This type of accent exists not only in Standard Japanese but in many dialects, including Kyoto. But the flat types are different in the Tokyo and Kyoto dialects. In the Tokyo dialect, the first syllable always has a low…

Reviews research studies that raise serious questions about phonological neutralization, that is, the merger of a contrast in certain contexts. Some findings cast doubt on the very existence of neutralization and the correctness of the theoretical principles that make assumptions based on neutralization. Reanalyzes neutralization in light of these…

Notes that few phonemes exhibit greater variance in the membership of phonemes that make up an equivalency class than the phoneme represented by /r/. Points out that the relationship between the auditory features of the speech signal and phonetic classification provides insight into a language's encoding and decoding system. (23 references)…

Tonal "flip-flop" (reversal of pitch value in which a direct exchange of value between two items is necessarily involved) can be found in a significant number of modern Chinese dialects, where an opposite pitch pattern is observed for the traditional Yin/Yang dichotomy of tones. (Author/CB)

Notes that English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Suggests the existence of an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar to account for the constraint. (26 references) (Author/CK)