In Quiegolani Zapotec (QZ), a language spoken by approximately 3,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico, words contain minimal consonant clusters of two or even three consonants, and most of these clusters show a decreasing scope of sonority. This violates sonority constraints proposed by Greenberg (1978) and further discussed by Bell and Saka (1983). QZ,…

This paper demonstrates the qualitative differences between the long and short vowels of Navaho from spectrum analysis of the language made by the Kay Electric Sona-Graph. (CK)

Presents arguments to disprove the thesis that "the phoneme is a bundle of distinctive features." (RM)

THIS PAPER WRITTEN IN FRENCH, PRESENTS A HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE DECODING OF SPEECH IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF THE DISCUSSION CONSISTS OF WIDELY ACCEPTED LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS SUCH AS THE PHONEME, DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, NEUTRALIZATION, LINGUISTIC LEVELS, FORM AND SUBSTANCE, EXPRESSION AND CONTENT, SOUNDS, PHONEMES,…

A forced-choice paired-comparison test containing 252 items was presented to eight subjects. Each item consisted of two geometric figures chosen systematically from a sample of four ellipses and four triangles. The subjects (six female and two male adults who spoke only English) were asked to decide which of the two figures went best with a…

This paper examines the distinction between primary and secondary articulations of consonants. It shows that the description and classification of speech sounds should not be based on physical parameters alone. Some essential distinctions reveal themselves only inferentially through the relation of a sound to others in the language system.…

A phonetic analysis of Latin long vowels is followed by a phonological analysis which asks whether these vowels are phonemes and, if so, what their distinctive features are. (AM)

Discusses the status of nasal vowels in modern French and their evolution, as rule-governed derivations, from morphophonologically based rules to phonemic-phonetically based ones. (Author/AM)

Presents the main outlines of the phonology of the Arekuna language as it is spoken by the Arekuna Indians of Guyana. (Author/RM)

Presents a "phonetological" approach for the improvement of the phonetic transcription of English, in order to account for certain distinctions in the language not currently rendered due to phonemic influence on phonetic transcription. (AM)

While there has been considerable success in isolating the dimensions of acoustic information that are important in perceiving and identifying speech sounds, very little is known about how the information from the various acoustic dimensions is put together in order to actually accomplish identification. Proposes and tests a model of these…

Considers the use of the Indonesian preposition "oleh" in verb constructions and argues that the construction without this preposition has an incorporated agent. (CB)

Examines the syntactic and semantic relationship between verb forms I and II in modern standard Arabic. The main function of form II verbs was causative/factitive, with the core elements of the causative including (1) agent-subject, (2) action-process verb, and (3) patient-object. (CB)

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