Like that of many other Germanic languages, the stress system of Swedish has mainly undergone phonological analysis. Recently, however, researchers have begun to recognize the central role of morphology in these systems. Similar to the lexical specification of tonal accent, the Swedish stress system is claimed to be morphologically determined and morphemes are thus categorized as prosodically s...

In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in F0, intensity, duration, F1, and voice quality, but F0 is the best predictor of primary stress. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly cued by a difference in F0. With regards to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowe...

Formant bandwidth is known to have little effect on vowel quality. This paper shows that it has a strong effect on mutual masking between vowels. Subjects presented with stimuli consisting of pairs of synthetic vowels were requested to report one or two vowels for each stimulus. Identification rates were calculated independently for both vowels in the stimulus. Vowels had either the same or dif...

This paper explores the reason why Finnish single (short) vowels tend to occupy less peripheral positions in the F1/F2 vowel space compared to their double (long) counterparts. The results of two production studies suggest that the less extreme vowel quality of single vowels is best described as arising from undershoot of articulatory/acoustic targets due to their short durations, assuming sing...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between compensatory shortening and coarticulation in German tense and lax vowels and to determine whether this relationship was influenced by prosodic accentuation. While previous studies focussed on temporal vowel reduction due to compensatory shortening, and often found conflicting results, our study extends previous results by includ...

In this study 91 local Swedish dialects were analysed based on vowel pronunciation. Acoustic measurements of vowel quality were made for 18 vowels of 1,014 speakers by means of principal component analysis of vowel spectra. Two principal components were extracted explaining more than 34 of the total variance in the vowel spectra. Plotting vowels in the PC1-PC2 plane showed a solution with stron...

Sopranos are notoriously difficult to understand. This study tracks the progressive loss with extreme high f0 of (a) vowel quality distinctions, and (b) the percept of a syllable-initial lateral. A soprano sang [lV] syllables on the notes of an arpeggio from A4 to A5. V ranged over [i, ɛ, a, ɑ, ɔ, u, əә]. She performed as a phonetician, not a trained singer, so that aesthetic adjustments of vow...

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...