Arabic phonetics has been part of the study of Arabic language since the 7 th century CE. The great works by Al-Khali:l, "Kita:b al-'Ayn", and Si:bawayh, author of the first Arabic grammar book "al-kita:b" (i.e., "The Book") are the two cornerstones of this field. The early Arab grammarians knew phonetics quite well, although they mixed it with phonology, but interest in phonetics has remained ...

In the last fifteen years, there have been major paradigm shifts in both general and applied linguistics toward acknowledging intonation as an indispensable component of language and communication. In addition, the hardware and software for conducting acoustic phonetic signal analysis have recently become more accessible. The main goal of this paper is thus to integrate the two seemingly dispar...

This study is part of a programmatic research on Twi undertaken at the laboratory of general and experimental phonetics at the Institut de Phonétique de Strasbourg. Twi is a register tone language spoken in Ghana, West Africa. It has a two tone system (high/low) and the downstep phenomena. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, some phonological aspects of Twi tones are described. Second, pr...

The derivational view of phonetics-phonology (Ladd, this volume) expresses an intuition that seems valid, namely, that there is a distinction to be made between quantitative and qualitative aspects of phonetics-phonology. Incomplete neutralization (Ernestus and Baayen, this volume) and other phenomena like it indicate that the specific way of drawing that distinction is too rigid. At the same t...

Abstract Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known affect the acquisition certain markers, we examine bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate bilingual contact-induced variability, namely, reduction in inventory word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children United Sta...

Sociophonetics integrates principles, techniques, and theoretical frameworks from phonetics with those from sociolinguistics. Early work under this label typically involved applications of standard phonetic methods – vowel formant analysis, for example – to ‘sociolinguistic’ data, such as socially-differentiated corpora of speech, or to non-standard dialects of widely-spoken languages. In that ...

Many phonetics textbooks state that, in sequences of two stop consonants in English, the first stop is commonly unreleased. For nonhomorganic stop consonant sequences, this statement may be taken to imply that the (necessary) articulatory release of the first stop has no observable acoustic consequences. To examine this claim, we recorded sentences, produced by several native speakers of Americ...

Mapping from acoustic signals to lexical representations is a complex process mediated by a number of different levels of representation. This paper reviews properties of the phonetic and phonological levels, and hypotheses about how category structure is represented at each of these levels, and evaluates these in light of relevant electrophysiological studies of phonetics and phonology. The pa...

A new articulatory synthesizer (SAPWindows), with a modular and flexible design, is described. A comprehensive acoustic model and a new interactive glottal source were implemented. Perceptual tests and simulations made possible by the synthesizer contributed to deepen our knowledge of one of the most important characteristics of European Portuguese, the nasal vowels. First attempts at incorpora...