Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by phonologically nasal consonant or stressed vowel and does not affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive affects morpheme-initial stops across morpheme boundary. Many forms that include causative prefix show this kind nasalization. However, spread lacks an...

Sensory consonance and dissonance are perceptual attributes of musical intervals conveying pleasantness, tension, and harmony in musical phrases. For complex-tone dyads, corresponding to two musical notes played simultaneously, consonance is known to vary with the ratio in fundamental frequency (F0) between the two tones in the dyad. While such a relationship is well established for dyads, the ...

Kera (a Chadic language) has been cited as one of a handful of languages which exhibit long distance voicing harmony between consonants (Rose and Walker 2001, Odden 1994). It has also been claimed that Kera voiced ('depressor') consonants lower the tone of the following syllable (Ebert 1979, Wolff 1987a, Pearce 1998). This paper addresses both of these claims, showing with recordings, pitch tra...

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

Harmony issues are widespread in human society and nature. To analyze these issues, harmony theory has been proposed as the main theoretical approach for the study of interpersonal relationships and relationships between humans and nature. Therefore, it is of great importance to study harmony theory. After briefly introducing the basic concepts of harmony theory, this paper expounds the five el...

Musical norms evolve over time. In the eleventh century parallel perfect fifths were tolerated, and perfect fourths were considered more consonant than thirds. In the eighteenth century, parallel perfect fifths were not tolerated, and thirds were considered more consonant than perfect fourths. And in the twentieth century, all manner of traditional prohibitions collapsed, as composers reveled i...

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...

The present study will focus on occurrence of fully voiced, devoiced and elided high vowels in Japanese. High vowels elision in Japanese is supported by clear acoustic evidences, even though it is not globally accepted by scholars in the field. Elided vowels, hence, are considered here to have their own status. Moreover, this study is conceived in order to state differences and analogies among ...