Hyper-articulation of vowel and consonant contrasts is often reported in infant-directed speech (IDS), but is not universal cross-linguistically, and may be a side-effect of speaking rate. This study investigated the voicing characteristics of the four-way oral stop voicing contrast in Nepali IDS. Both lead and lag time of word-onset/g,…

Brazilian Portuguese allows only /s, N, l, r/ syllable finally, and of these, only /s/ is realized faithfully (as well as /r/ for some speakers). In order to avoid unacceptable codas, dialects of Brazilian Portuguese employ such strategies as epenthesis, nasal absorption, debucalization, and gliding. The current analysis argues that codas in…

THE LANGUAGES OF OKINAWAN MAY BE DIVIDED INTO THREE MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE REGIONAL DIALECTS, CORRESPONDING GEOGRAPHICALLY TO THE THREE GROUPS OF ISLANDS OF THE RYUUKYUU ARCHIPELAGO. AS REPRESENTATIVE MODEL OF THE REGIONAL DIALECTS, AGENA-GUCHI IS ANALYZED WITH RESPECT TO PHONEMIC SYSTEMS, OKINAWAN MORPHOPHONEMICS, AND OKINAWAN SYLLABLE STRUCTURE…

Vowel quality in pretonic syllables seems to result both from the interaction of the four main parameters of stress within the syllable and from the relationship of these values to those of the tonic vowel. (Author/MSE)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, The American Philosophical Society, and The Fulbright Commission. (DD)

Criticizes Chomsky's theory of the syllabic feature as a major class feature in The Sound Pattern of English'' (New York, Harper and Row, 1968). (RS)

Research supported by a grant from the Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, National Institutes of Health. (DD)

Data based on residence in San Pedro, October 1970-May 1971. (DD)

Adapted from the author's M.A. thesis, University of Queensland, 1971; slightly revised version of a paper presented at the 1973 Conference of the Linguistic Society of Australia. (DD)

Reply to the article by Victoria Fromkin, FL 501 940. (VM)

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)