The purpose of this paper is to document the early Spanish speech development of a toddler, K, whose cochlear implant was activated at age 20 months. The contribution of K's developmental pattern to research is unique in that Spanish is the sole language of the home, as well as being the language of intervention up to 16 months postimplant (3…

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)

Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, and Romance vowel sounds and their production are discussed. (RM)

This paper attempts to develop some relatively well-defined notions that may be of use in descriptive semantics and in some areas of cognitive psychology. These notions are intended as explications of certain terms widely used in these fields such as semantic dimension, semantic feature, semantic space, category, conjunctive category, and sememe.…

An experimental phonetic investigation is described whose goal it was to develop a test which could be used to establish norms in the perception of vowels by native speakers of German. Particular emphasis is placed upon the design of the experiment. The test procedure and the results are discussed. Available from Albert J. Phiebig, Inc., P.O. Box…

Deals with 13th and 14th century distribution of [s] and [z] retracted or apical sibilants in the languages of Western and Central Europe. Based on philological evidence and on dialect evidence of today, the presence of various sibilants is determined. (SC)

Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

The tone-changing rules in Central (Standard) Thai are traditionally analyzed as having five contrasting tones--mid, low, high, falling, and rising. (Abramson's graph of the fundamental frequency variations for single vowel Thai syllables illustrates these five tones.) Theoretically, each tone may be part of any Thai syllable. Any Thai syllable…

This paper discusses the term "language universal" and posits a definition of a "counter-universal." It is proposed that the voiced aspirates of Bario Kelabit represent an exception to a posited phonological behavioral universal and are an important addition to the inventory of possible phonetic segments. (AM)

The characteristics of French nasal vowels in the case of various CVCV combinations are studied. A set of CVCV utterances was read by speakers (5 males and 5 females) and analyzed using predictive coding techniques. The consonant consisted of voiced stops, unvoiced stops, nasal consonants... while the vowel V was one of 4 nasal French vowels.…

Described is an instructional procedure, based on distinctive features approach, for teaching the stop-fricative (a consonant characterized by frictional parrage of expired breath) contrast to children with articulation problems. (CL)

The specific problems involved in teaching pronunciation cannot be solved by the techniques of phonemic analysis alone. What is needed is an extension of these techniques to include the principles of textual phonetics. (CFM)

Several traditional phonetic theories are explained and discussed. It is asserted that recent advances in knowledge of speech production and speech perception show that these theories are descriptively inadequate and that physiologic principles may instead structure phonetic feature theories. (Author/RM)

The selective tuning of feature detectors sensitive to the acoustic information relevant to the assignment of distinctive phonetic feature values was investigated with a contingent adaptation paradigm. (Author/RM)

A study of the relationship of morphology and syntax to the communication process from the functionalist viewpoint. Topics considered are: morphological processes, that is the distinction between functional and contingent language facts; the degree of necessity of syntax; the difference between functionalism and traditional grammar. (Text is in…