The analysis of interviews with 14 speakers of Honduran Spanish found that group "r,""l" glides, and "s" inhibit spirantization variably, much as they do in Colombian Spanish, presenting a view that attributes spirantization to syllable structure for a more comprehensive explanation of the variable processes. (29…

Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, and Romance vowel sounds and their production are discussed. (RM)

Several traditional phonetic theories are explained and discussed. It is asserted that recent advances in knowledge of speech production and speech perception show that these theories are descriptively inadequate and that physiologic principles may instead structure phonetic feature theories. (Author/RM)

The dictionary, intended primarily for teachers and students of phonetics, contains almost 2,000 terms used in the field of phonetics. Areas covered include articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual phonetics, classical and generative phonology, distinctive features, the phonology of English, and phonological change and variation. Terminology is…

Reasons for the structural or functional classification of the Russian /y/ as an allophone of /i/ are explained in this article. Theory countering this classification, proposed by L.V. Scherba and L.R. Zinder, is also presented. Additionally, comments by Kenneth Pike support the author's criticism of the structuralist approach to the problem. (RL)

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…

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

The pronunciations of children do not merely represent accidental misses with respect to adult pronunciation. Children employ substitutions and deletions in highly systematic ways; child pronunciations reflect a set of simplification strategies. The major common processes of both normal and abnormal child phonology result in simplification of…

Analysis of the babbling of five infants indicated that between 14 and 40 percent of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency, suggesting that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relationships that are not adult-modeled. (Author/CB)

A discussion of the nasal harmony of Aguaruna, a language of the Jivaroan family in South America, approaches the subject from the viewpoint of generative phonology. This theory of phonology proposes an underlying nasal consonant, later deleted, that accounts for vowel nasalization. Complex rules that suppose a complex system of vowel and…

This study of 10 intonation curves, representative of speech patterns in French, entails spectrographic analysis of the variations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. Discriminatory auditory tests are based on semantic oppositions caused by single intonation contrasts. The seven distinctive classes called "intonemes" are: (1) minor…

At vowel onset following unvoiced consonants in /h-cvc/ utterances spoken by two talkers, Fo began high and fell about seven percent in the first five centiseconds. At closure of voiced oral obstruents, Fo suddenly dipped about ten percent, remained flat, suddenly rose about twenty five percent at opening of closure, and, after vowel onset,…

Phonetic and phonological analysis of spontaneous speech of six 2-year-old monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-learning children revealed several sound usage patterns similar to those found in English and other language-learning children, supporting the claim that certain universal patterns exist in phonological development. (Author/CB)

Presents: (1) the basic facts of vowel-zero alternations and palatalization in Polish; (2) a nonlinear account of the vowel-zero alternations; (3) a reanalysis of palatalization facts in terms of morpholexical rules; and (4) speculations relating to learnability considerations and the nature of linguistic theory construction. (CB)