Discusses phonic shifting or sound shifts through an examination of Grimm's Law, or the Germanic Consonant Shift. The discussion includes comments on why the phonic shift developed and its pattern. (10 references) (GLR)

Reviews and comments on the major points made in Albert Gessman's paper, "Grimm's Law: Fact or Myth?" Through the evaluation of the paper's 13 points, several ideas are pointed out that are believed to be crucial to Gessman's arguments. (29 references) (GLR)

Sentences were read by six informants to determine the presence or absence of /n/ in /nth/ sequences. The sentences contained seven different levels of juncture with /nth/ occurring in word final position, intervocalically, and across word boundaries, among other places. Dental coarticulation was not hindered by most junctures. (SC)

Dental fricatives are examined within the two languages to show that the phonemes do not differ merely in voicing. Frisian has a "v" which is phonologically related to "w." Marathi has an aspirated "v." The use of "f" and "v" in English by speakers of Marathi and Flemish is also examined. (SC)

The salience of voiced onset time (VOT) as a voicing cue for initial stop-vowel units is examined. VOT duration was altered. Findings did not indicate that changes in VOT duration altered the perception of voicing. Aspiration more than VOT seems to be more important in the detection of voicing. (SC)

CERTAIN FEATURES IN THE MEXICAN PRONUNCIATION OF NASAL CONSONANTS ARE PRESENTED HERE AND LINGUISTIC GENERALIZATIONS ARE FORMULATED--FIRST IN TERMS OF A CURRENT THEORY OF UNIVERSAL PHONOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, AND SECOND IN TERMS OF A REVISED DISTINCTIVE FEATURE FRAMEWORK INCORPORATING THE CHANGES PROPOSED BY CHOMSKY AND HALLE IN "THE SOUND…

A study of the opposition in terms of duration between long and short vowels in the German phonological system. Tables, graphs and analyses accompany the conclusions discussed. Since physical time is not the only distinctive feature, loss of the temporal cue is compensated for by spectral cues. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A previously prosed rule of absolute neutralization (merging underlying low vowels) is eliminated in an alternative analysis including instead a rule that "breaks" the feature matrix of certain low vowels and redistributes the features of each vowel as a sequence of vowel-like transition plus (a). (Author/RM)

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)

Based on tape recorded conversations of 28 informants in 18 Louisiana communities, this study investigated regional phonological variants in Louisiana speech. On the basis of settlement history and previous dialect studies, four regions are defined: northern Louisiana, the Florida Parishes, French Louisiana, and New Orleans. The informants are all…

Develops a method of analyzing and describing the acoustic properties of fricatives, which consists of making frequency spectra using the Fast Fourier Transform and then analyzing the spectra in terms of critical bands. The six fricatives of Chinese are analyzed by this method, and comparison with other languages is made. (SED)

This paper attempts to prove that King's (1973) hypothesis of a distinction between the phonological and the phonetic level, if it exists, is not as intuitively recognizable as he indicates. Two rules which King maintains are phonetic (one relating to regressive assimilation, the other to velar anteriorization) are shown not to correspond to his…

The reappearance of an old controversy on how best to analyze the Russian palatalized consonants prompts the author of this article to define the words "palatalization" and "palatal." Contrastive examples clarify phonetic terminology including the classifications of "labial voiced and voiceless palatalized stops,""labial voiced and voiceless…