One of the most widely studied observations in linguistic phonetics is that, all else being equal, vowels are longer before voiced than before voiceless obstruents. The causes of this phonetic generalization are, however, poorly understood and several competing explanations have been proposed. No studies have so far measured vowel duration before stops with yet another laryngeal feature: ejecti...

This article reports on segmental duration measurements of eight selected consonants (voiceless obstruents, nasals and liquids) and three vowels in 192 disyllabic (CVCe) nonsense words with stress on the first syllable, spoken in isolation by 12 Spanish speakers. Durations as measured based on acoustic discontinuities are discussed along with speaker variability. The intrinsic and context-depen...

Among the most fascinating data for phonology are those showing how speakers incorporate new words and foreign words into their language system, since these data provide cues to the actual principles underlying language. In this article, we address how speakers deal with neutralized obstruents in new words. We formulate four hypotheses and test them on the basis of Dutch word-final obstruents, ...

This paper discusses two well-known phonetic-phonological phenomena of Japanese, vowel devoicing and mora-timed rhythm. Regarding vowel devoicing as a process of vowels getting consonantal, it may change the mora-templated syllable structures of Japanese, resulting in the deviation from mora-timed rhythm. To investigate spontaneous Japanese with comparison to other languages, the label data of ...

"Vowel devoicing" occurs more frequently in the Tokyo dialect (standard Japanese) than in the Osaka dialect. Our previous study showed that devoicing was a) highly frequent when a stop or an affricate was at least on one side, b) less frequent when fricatives were on both sides, and c) infrequent when there was a following /h/. In order to clarify why asymmetric effect of consonantal kind on vo...

The speech unit segmentation is an important pre-processing step in the analysis of cleft palate speech. In Mandarin, one syllable is composed of two parts: initial and final. In cleft palate speech, the resonance disorders occur at the finals and the voiced initials, while the articulation disorders occur at the unvoiced initials. Thus, the initials and finals are the minimum speech units, whi...