English is not typically considered to be a vowel harmony language, and yet one of its cousins, Buchan Scots, clearly shows vowel-harmonic patterns. This involves type height which blocked by certain consonants consonant clusters (which do form natural class). The front /ɪ/ has historically functioned as high but seems have changed into non-high in the inland dialectal variant. article consider...

This project searches for consistent acoustic attributes in a broad set of American English consonants that would help in identifying their word positions in running speech. A database of sentences containing word pairs (e.g. "lay keys" vs. "lake ease" for /k/) of thirteen consonants (six stops, two affricates, three fricatives, and two nasals), controlled for prosodic boundaries, pitch accents...

The temporal interval of a segment such as a vowel or a consonant, which is essential for understanding coarticulation, is conventionally, though largely implicitly, defined as the time period during which the most characteristic acoustic patterns of the segment are to be found. We report here evidence for a need to reconsider this kind of definition. In two experiments, we compared the relativ...

Studies on child phonology suggest that there exist phonological universals in the timing of phonological events and the order of acquiring phonological categories. According to Jakobson (1941/1968), voiceless (unaspirated) stops are acquired earlier than voiced or aspirated ones, and front consonants are acquired earlier than back consonants (i.e., bilabial > alveolar > velar). With regard to ...

L'objectif de ce travail est montrer les principales similitudes phonétiques et phonologiques qui se présentent dans la langue guarani française. Similitudes facilitent aident à prononciation correcte des phonèmes français. Afin analyser, on a fait entretiens aux étudiants licence en français l'Institut Supérieur Langues-UNA ont le l'espagnol comme langues maternelles. Les été enregistrés pour ...

Gong Hwang-cherng proposed that the Tangut language has a distinction between short and long vowels. To date, however, no reliable correlates have been found regarding actual phonological nature of distinction. A careful examination Chinese loanwords in Sino-Tangut pronunciation reveals “vowel length” should be revised to presence vs. absence nasal preinitial. The pair “weed” “tomb,” borrowed r...

Abstract This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Spanish, nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end word (e.g., Yucatá instead [n]). Since this phenomenon widespread Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown other Spanish-speaking regions, it linked to influence indigenous ...

Abstract The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) is a fundamental governing principle of syllable structure; however, its details remain contested. This study aims to clarify the empirical status SSP in cross-linguistic 496 languages. We adopt phonetically-grounded definition sonority – acoustic intensity and examine how many languages contain SSP-violating clusters word-initially word-finally....

phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ ‘fairy-tale’). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work inv...