Experiments were conducted to examine the influence of syntactic boundaries on the operation of a phonological rule in speech production. Results indicate that traditional metrics of boundary strength, as well as linguistic formulations of phonological rules, must be elaborated to recognize the special status of clause boundaries and deletion…

This paper gives a complete account of vowel nasalization in Standard Polish. A distinction is made between obligatory and phonostylistic processes. Phonostylistic evidence may serve as a basis for making unambiguous decisions about the structure of underlying representations, intermediate phonological forms, and assimilation of borrowings to the…

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)

In order to investigate the articulatory dynamics of the tongue in the production of Swedish vowels, electromyographic (EMG) and X-ray microbeam studies were performed on a native Swedish subject. The EMG signals were used to obtain average indication of the muscle activity of the tongue as a function of time. (NCR)

The relationship between the rhythms of spoken language and the rhythms of other human behavior is examined in terms of: (1) types of rhythmic structures observed, (2) rate of succession of rhythmic units, (3) a perceptual tendency equalization of physically unequal intervals, and (4) the variability of rhythmic motor action. (Author/RM)

Adults and 4-year-old children were tested to determine whether the children were able to decode sets of familiar minimal pairs as well as adults. They listened to words spoken in a normal voice and a whisper. Indications were that the 4-year-old's perceptual mastery of English phonology is not yet complete. (SW)