This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on preceding vowel is important signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The vowel-consonant monosyllabic words Cantonese represents a testing case for ...

In Contemporary Standard Russian, the stressed vowel inventory /i,e,a,o,u/ is reduced to [i, ́,u] in unstressed syllables. (The precise realization of “ ́” depends on whether the relevant vowel is pretonic or not, among other things.) Examples of the resulting alternations are shown in (1). After palatalized consonants, only [i,u] occur. Though vowel reduction in Russian has been very well studie...

1 Introduction English is a stress-timed language displaying phonological vowel reduction: weak vowels, such as schwa (.ə.(, are part of the phonological form of many words in the language (mother .ˈmʌðə., banana .bəˈnɑːnə.(Furthermore , English allows important weakening processes in function words (prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions), in which peripheral vowels are often...

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced Iranian ESL learners. A total of 36 adult Iranian ESL learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at Memorial University (MUN) were recruited for the study. Advanced participants had the experience of living in Canada for at least three years while beginners...

Russian exhibits a rich pattern of phonological vowel reduction, by which some vowel contrasts are neutralized in unstressed syllables. Recent work in phonology suggests a mechanism by which phonetic vowel reduction--compression of the overall vowel space due to target undershoot--might lead to patterns like Russian. Presenting acoustic data from 9 speakers of Russian, we use Euclidean distance...

The paper presents a corpus-based research on clitic-host relations within the prepositional group in Russian. As a phonetic criterion for determining the relation between clitics and their hosts, we suggest using the degree of vowel reduction— the phenomenon functioning within the prosodic word. A comparison of vowel reduction patterns for clitic group vs prosodic word with no adjacent clitics...

This study investigates the reduction of vowel /e/ in the French word c’était /sete/ ‘it was’. This reduction phenomenon appeared to be highly frequent, asmore than half of the occurrences of this word in a corpus of casual French contained few or no acoustic traces of a vowel between [s] and [t]. All our durational analyses clearly supported a categorical absence of vowel /e/ in a subset of c’...