Hyper-articulation of vowel and consonant contrasts is often reported in infant-directed speech (IDS), but is not universal cross-linguistically, and may be a side-effect of speaking rate. This study investigated the voicing characteristics of the four-way oral stop voicing contrast in Nepali IDS. Both lead and lag time of word-onset/g,…

Brazilian Portuguese allows only /s, N, l, r/ syllable finally, and of these, only /s/ is realized faithfully (as well as /r/ for some speakers). In order to avoid unacceptable codas, dialects of Brazilian Portuguese employ such strategies as epenthesis, nasal absorption, debucalization, and gliding. The current analysis argues that codas in…

Adapted from the author's M.A. thesis, University of Queensland, 1971; slightly revised version of a paper presented at the 1973 Conference of the Linguistic Society of Australia. (DD)

Electromyographic experiments were performed indicating that durational differences between vowels that precede voiced consonants and those that precede voiceless ones are due to a sustention of muscular activity in articulation, which occurs only with vowels preceding voiced consonants. (SC)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Research supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research. (DD)

Describes two experiments in which subjects read aloud pairs of nonsense syllables rapidly presented on a display screen or repeated the same syllables presented auditorily. Results support an explanation of the speech error generation process in which a segment's strength is a function of its frequency of occurrence in English. (SED)

Research supported by the Science Research Council. (DD)

This paper argues that Chomsky's and Halle's restriction on the features [+high, +low] are too severe; that this restriction is inconsistent with the generative treatment of affricates, laterally-released stops, and prenasalized stops; and that the restriction is inconsistent with the notion that linguistic descriptions are abstract theories about…

Analysis of the distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels within word boundaries in Italian demonstrates: the role of phonological constraints on the distribution of non-syllabic words; the syllabification possibilities within each type of sequence by setting up a structural model; and the phonemic occurrences in vowel sequences collected…

The experiment reported here attempted to investigate the nature of both intrinsic, unlearned temporal parameters as well as learned, language-specific durational properties in the speech of young children. Developmental aspects of several temporal parameters were investigated in the speech of ten 2 1/2 to 3-year-old and ten 4 to 4 1/2-year-old…