An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

All languages change over time. English has undergone continuous change throughout its three major periods: Old English (roughly from 450 to 1100 AD), Middle English (from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (from 1500 to the present). Sound is one of the most easily influenced parts of language to be subject to different changes. Sound change is…

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,…

In sound symbolism, a word's sound induces expectations about the nature of a salient aspect of the word's referent. P. Walker (2016a) proposed that cross-sensory correspondences can be the source of these expectations, and the present study assessed three implications flowing from this proposal. First, sound symbolism will embrace a wide range of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of biofeedback on control of nasalization in individuals with typical speech. Method: Forty-eight individuals with typical speech attempted to increase and decrease vowel nasalization. During training, stimuli consisted of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) tokens with the center vowels…

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…

In Modern Mongolian the palatalized vowels [a?, ??, ?? ] before palatalized consonants are considered as phoneme allophones according to the most scholars. Nevertheless theses palatalized vowels have the distinctive features what could be proved by the minimal pairs and nowadays this question is open and not profoundly studied. The purpose of this…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the use of diacritics in the Arabic script of Malay to facilitate Arab postgraduate students of UKM to read the Malay words accurately. It is hypothesised that the Arabic script could facilitate the reading of Malay words among the Arab students because of their earlier exposure to the Arabic script in…

L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic…

This study investigated the effects of high front (HF) vowels and low back (LB) vowels on inter-listener and intra-listener reliability in rating hypernasality. Audio recorded samples of two sentences, one containing only high front vowels and one containing only low back vowels, were judged by two expert listeners. Speakers were 25 children; 20…

THE RELATION IS EXAMINED BETWEEN SIMPLE VOWEL SOUNDS IN ENGLISH AND VOWELS ASSOCIATED WITH GLIDES, OR SEMIVOWELS, SOMETIMES REFERRED TO AS "COMPOUND PHONEMES." THESE COMPLEX VOWEL NUCLEI PARTICIPATE IN MORPHOPHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS WITH SIMPLE VOWEL NUCLEI, AS FOR EXAMPLE, IN THE ALTERNATION OF VOWEL NUCLEI IN THE PAIR "SLEEP/SLEPT." THE SYSTEM…

By electronically segmenting stimuli in German, two tests of perception of quantity related to tense or lax syllabic quantity were made possible. In one, the physical duration of the stressed vowel was shortened, and in the other, the occlusion of the consonant following the stressed vowel was shortened. (MSE)

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…