An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

In Modern Mongolian the palatalized vowels [a?, ??, ?? ] before palatalized consonants are considered as phoneme allophones according to the most scholars. Nevertheless theses palatalized vowels have the distinctive features what could be proved by the minimal pairs and nowadays this question is open and not profoundly studied. The purpose of this…

Revised version of a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Western Conference on Linguistics, Vancouver, October 22, 1971. (VM)

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

British English and Nepali monophthongs (pure vowels) are analyzed and compared in terms of their distinctive features, and pedagogical implications for Nepali learners of English as a Second Language are discussed. First, the two vowel systems are outlined and described in terms of eight distinctive features: vowel height, backness, lip rounding,…

Cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in infant babbling analyzed 1047 vowels produced by 10-month-olds (N=20) from French, English, Cantonese, and Arabic language backgrounds. Results revealed differences among infants across language backgrounds, with the differences paralleling those found in adult speech in the…

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)

A study of vowel substitution in Finnish learners of English as a second language looked at the quantitative characteristics of qualitatively similar vowels under different tempo conditions. Specifically, it compared the effects of rate of speech and vowel duration on the eleven stressed monophthongal English vowels and their Finnish counterparts.…

This volume presents a study of the clause as a verb-centered construction surrounded by certain nuclear constituents which serve to subcategorize it. Five India-Nepal languages are examined: Kotia Oriya, Kupia, and Maithili (Indo-Aryan family); and Dhanghar-Kurux and Kolani (Dravidian family). Dhangar-Kurux and Maithili are spoken in Nepal, the…

This paper discusses the relationship of Polish to the other languages considered to be within the Slavic group. The comparison is mainly phonological and considers the Proto-Slavic features still preserved in Polish as well as the distinctive features of Polish which have developed from Proto-Slavic. The development of vowels and consonants is…

This paper focuses on British English. Such rules as might be devised for specification of segment length would have to take into account, among other factors, the lenis/fortis nature of the segments at syllable margins, degree of stress, the relation between a given syllable and others in the same rhythm group, the same relations within the word,…

This volume, the second in a series of four on the languages of Nepal, contains the following papers: "Clause Patterns in Nepaili,""Clause Patterns in Tamang," and "A Survey of Clause Patterns." For other volumes in the series, see FL 004 896, FL 004 897, and FL 004 898. (DD)

This study is comprised of five major sections, each of which focuses on a central linguistic issue germane to the understanding of the general phonetic characteristics of languages. The sections include: (1) a comparative study of terminal consonant releases; (2) the influence of consonants upon contiguous vowels --phase 1: vowel duration; (3)…

This study identified two types of interference between Hungarian and English: phonetic and phonological interference. Four native speakers of Hungarian who are second language speakers of English read a passage containing a wide variety of sounds in different phonological environments. A set of rules mapping American English onto…