Vowel duration has been an issue in the study of Civili. Although minimal pairs based on vowel duration can be established at both perceptual and physical level, vowel lengthening still occurs in the context of voiced consonants in the language. A comparison between a measured physical duration and an experimentally perceived duration confirms the phonemic distinctiveness of vowel length and in...

It is widely claimed that close vowels in Japanese are devoiced when they occur between voiceless consonants. In this paper, voiceless vowels are represented symbolically as [V-] and voiced vowels as [V+]. The patterns of linguopalatal contact during C[V-]C units and the corresponding C[V+]C units are examined using the method of electropalatography (EPG). Our results show that C[V-]C units and...

The well-studied phenomenon of vowel lengthening before tense sonorants in Modern Irish (Ó Siadhail 1989, Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975, Ó Baoill 1979), exemplified in (1), is now well understood as a compensatory process (see for example Ní Chiosain 1991). Tense or long sonorants (L, L', R', N, N', m) trigger vowel lengthening and/or diphthongization. What is not clear about this phenomenon is th...

Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

Voice onset time (VOT) is an important parameter of speech that denotes the time interval between consonant onset and the onset of low-frequency periodicity generated by rhythmic vocal cord vibration. Voiced stop consonants (/b/, /g/, and /d/) in syllable initial position are characterized by short VOTs, whereas unvoiced stop consonants (/p/, /k/, and t/) contain prolonged VOTs. As the VOT is i...

The vast majority of severe (Type 0) spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) cases are caused by homozygous deletions survival motor neuron 1 ( SMN1 ). We report a case in which the patient has two copies but clinically presents as Type 0 SMA. is an African American male carrying maternally inherited missense variant (c.796T>C) cis -oriented duplication on one chromosome and deletion other (genoty...

This study investigates the development of a phrase-initial pitch contrast in Seoul Korean (SK) and also its effect on Korean prosody. SK is known to show a pitch contrast phrase-initially, depending on the initial onset consonant of Accentual Phrases (AP), due to a recent tonogenesislike sound change. If an AP starts with an aspirated or tensed consonant, it shows a H pitch; otherwise, it show...

TWO EXPERIMENTS INVESTIGATED WHETHER AND HOW THE LEARNING OF SPELLINGS BY FRENCH THIRD GRADERS IS INFLUENCED BY TWO GRAPHOTACTIC PATTERNS: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and consonants cannot double after single consonants (Experiment 2). Children silently read meaningful texts that contained three types of novel spellings: no doublet (e.g., mupile, guprane), d...

We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several "nonaligned" vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน <ε:fn> is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other "aligned" vowels are written and sp...