Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder affecting articulatory planning and speech programming. When AOS is the sole manifestation of neurodegeneration, it is termed primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS). Recent work has shown that there are distinct PPAOS subtypes: phonetic, prosodic, and those that do not clearly…

Purpose: Pitch variations (tone productions) have been reported as a measure to differentiate Cantonese-speaking children with and without childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). This study aims to examine fundamental frequency (F0) changes within syllables and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and syllable positions on F0 in…

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurologic disorder in which an individual suddenly and unintentionally speaks with an accent which is perceived as being different from his/her usual accent. This study presents an acoustic-phonetic description of two Quebec French-speaking cases. The first speaker presents a perceived accent shift to…

The Acquisition of L2 Phonology is a wide-ranging new collection which focuses on various aspects of the acquisition of an L2 phonological system. The authors are researchers and practitioners from five different countries. The volume has been divided into three major sections. Phonetic Analysis presents five studies of language learners in both…

This thesis provides a comprehensive account of the intonational phonology of Lakota, an indigenous North American language of the Siouan family. Lakota is predominantly a verb final language, characterized by complex verbal morphology. The phonological description of Lakota intonation and prosody presented here is based on acoustic analysis of…

An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes "the" and "a". In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish…

A pneumotachographic investigation of intervocalic /p/, /t/ and /k/ was undertaken to isolate physiological parameters responsible for coarticulatory air-flow phenomena. Airflow was most sensitive during the /k/ closure phase. The dynamics of the closure phase for each place of articulation and their implications for pneumotachography are…

Vowel mutation in Welsh is outlined. A proposal that two classes of compounds exist in Welsh is based on the occurrence of vowel mutation in words and in certain compounds. Evidence from stress patterns and from non-phonological aspects of the grammar support this. An alternative proposal is discussed and rejected. Available from the MIT Press, 28…

Although a great many textbooks of general phonetics deal with the articulation and the acoustics of speech sounds, these works generally deal only briefly with the facts of suprasegmental phonetics--rythm, accent, and intonation. The author feels "it is precisely suprasegmental phonetics which is the most important in our French classes because…

This article is a critical review of a number of statistical works, over the past 50 years, dedicated to the determination of the relative frequency of phonemes. (Author/RM)

Field research into the Heiltsuk language, part of the Kwakiutlic branch of the Wakashan language family, in British Columbia is reported. Some of the features of Heiltsuk phonetics are discussed. (RM)

Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…

From a survey of over a thousand "diapoints" emerges a clear distributional pattern of nasal vowels in the contemporary dialects of China. They tend to occupy the lower portion of the vowel space. Three hypotheses are proposed to explain this phenomenon and each hypothesis is examined against a broad data base. (Author/TL)

Two experiments are reported which explore (1) into what categories do native listeners divide the perceived pitch contours of their language; (2) into what perceptual units can these overall contour structures be further broken down; and (3) what is the range of tolerance for each unit? (Author/RM)