Two experiments were designed to investigate two issues: (a) acoustic correlates in the place of articulation in Mandarin syllable-final nasals, and (b) the contribution of acoustic cues to perceptual saliency for the alveolar-velar nasal contrast. In Experiment 1, an acoustic analysis identified phonetic features adopted by L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin in Taiwan to distinguish the [n]-[ ] pa...

Naba, also known as Bilala, is a Nilo-Saharan (Sara-Bagirmi) language of Chad with about 410,000 speakers from three ethnic groups. This paper gives basic description the Naba phonological system, using segmental phonology and lexical approaches. Topics covered include phonemic inventory, syllable structure phonotactic restrictions, tone system its interaction other processes, main post-lexical...

The present study investigated the correlation between second-language (L2) proficiency and phonological development within a longitudinal frame. Five Brazilian learners of English participated in two data collection sessions with seven-month interval. Participants completed paragraph reading task containing several instances nasals rhotic coda word-final position, namely, /m n ɹ/. Proficiency ...

To examine perceptual similarity in cross-language speech perception as a multidimensional metric, an AXB classification test using nasal consonants from Malayalam ([m], [n+ ], [n], [÷], [ø], [N]) was administered to three sets of listener groups with common coronal nasal inventories: dental-retroflex (Marathi, Punjabi), alveolar-retroflex (Tamil, Oriya), and alveolar (Bengali, American English...

Portuguese is one of the two standard Romance varieties having nasal vowels as independent phonemes. These are complex sounds that have a dynamic nature and present several problems for a complete description. In this paper we present a new corpus especially recorded to allow studies of European Portuguese nasal vowels. The main purpose of these studies is the improvement of knowledge about the...

This study is an investigation of flaps and trills in Najdi Hijazi Arabic, which are the most spoken Arabic varieties Saudi Arabia. It focuses on how behave relation to vowels consonants two Arabic. The data this were collected from four five participants. A total number 730 sentences read by was found that /r/, underlying phoneme, surfaces as [r] when it occurs word-initially or after a [-coro...

In this paper we investigate patterns of place and stricture assimilation of Argentine Spanish nasals in order to test two competing models of phonological representations of place and stricture features (or tract variables). Electropalatographic (EPG) data from four speakers of Buenos Aires Spanish reveal that nasal assimilation before coronals within words (e.g. in /kanta/, /kansa/, /anʧa/) i...

1. Introduction Speech sounds convey not only linguistic or phonological information, but also nonlinguistic information, including the speakers' individualities [1]. It is known that the availability of the speech contents used for speaker identification differs depending on the types of sounds they contain, and it is reported that voiced sonorants, such as vowels and nasals, are most effectiv...

Listeners are sensitive to numerous fine-grained acoustic cues in speech. However, there has been little work examining how listeners encode these cues at early stages of perception. The event-related potential (ERP) technique provides a tool to help us address this. Previous work shows that the amplitude of the auditory N1 ERP component varies with differences along VOT continua, but it is not...

The osteology of Kisanganichthys casieri gen. and sp. nov., a small catervariolid fish from the Stanleyville Formation (Middle Jurassic), Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo, is studied in details. K. casieri gen. and sp. nov. has a pair of small triangular toothed lateral dermethmoids located at the symphysis op the upper jaw, the toothed premaxillae being more laterally positioned. The fr...