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 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)

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)

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)

Revised version of a paper, Restrictions on Phonetically-Plausible Rules in Phonology'', presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta, Georgia, December 28, 1972. (DD)

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