The term nasality refers to the timbre of the nasal phonemes. It is also used to express the quality of sound that characterises some speakers. In this paper, we propose to classify nasality in natural speech into four types: phonemic nasality, nasality in assimilation, incidental nasality in the production of voiced plosives, and nasality associated with speaker individuality. Speech sounds re...

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the phonology of English nasal-final prefixes within the framework of Optimality Theory, especially making use of a relation of correspondence. In this paper, I show that compared with previous analyses employing rules and their extrinsic orderings, a constraint-based approach can give a better account of the phenomenon. In order to do this, following ...

Frogs of the genus Atelognathus form a clade of nine narrowly distributed species restricted to Patagonia, southern Argentina and Chile, characterized by a large, exposed frontoparietal fontanelle, short palatines, large nasals and by the absence of quadratojugals and middle ear elements. Although Frost et al. (2006) have included Atelognathus in the redefined family Ceratophryidae, we have dat...

A longitudinal analysis is presented of the fillers of a Dutch-speaking child between 1.10 and 2.7. Our analysis corroborates familiar regularities reported in the literature: most fillers resemble articles in shape and distribution, and are affected by rhythmic and positional constraints. A novel finding is the impact of the lexical environment: particular function words act as 'anchor' words ...

This article aims to understand the development of diachronic asymmetries in phonological systems by evaluating variability stability synchronic contrasts. We focus on sonorant involving secondary palatalisation, grounded claim that palatalised laterals are more common than rhotics cross-linguistically. Our analysis reports acoustic and articulatory data Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language with ...

For nasal stops and nasalized vowels, one-tube models offer only an inadequate representation. To model the spectral components of nasal speech signals, a minimum of two connected tubes is necessary. Typically, the estimation of branched-tube area functions is based on a pole-zero model. The present paper introduces a variational Bayesian scheme under Gaussian assumptions to estimate the tube a...

• The sound change spread as a result of areal contact, possibly originating in Lushootseed (Thompson and Thompson 1972:450-1). ∗Thank you very much to Melinda Fricke, Clara Cohen, Keith Johnson, and the members of the Pacific Northwest Languages Working Group for helpful comments on how to improve this work. Thank you also to the Ditidaht Elders for sharing their language and culture with me, ...

Determining the cross-sectional areas of the vocal tract models from the linear predictive coding or autoregressive-moving-average analysis of speech signals from vowels has been of research interest for several decades now. To tune the shape of the vocal tract to given sets of formant frequencies, iterative methods using sensitivity functions have been developed. In this paper, the idea of sen...

careful analysis of the ferdows persian accent showed that the back vowel /a/ changes to front vowel [a] in the first syllable of bi-syllabic words and in the second syllable of tri-syllabic words. however, this does not occur in the last syllable. it was also found that different processes occur before nasals; /a/ changes to [o] before /m/. but before /n/, it changes to [a] in the penult of ...

the skull of two lacertid lizards of iran including eremias persica from isfahan province, central iranian plateau and mesalina watsonana from birjand in southern khorasan province, eastern iran, was described and compared based on seven dry skull preparations. prominent differences included: the shape of the premaxilla and its articulation with other skull elements, the shape of the frontal (p...