Previous studies have reported phonetic characteristics of the Shanghai Chinese phonological voicing contrast, which cooccurs with a tonal contrast. In stressed word-initial position, phonetic voicing is neutralized and replaced with a tonal register contrast: high ‘yin’ tones for (phonologically) voiceless and low ‘yang’ tones for voiced obstruents. Furthermore, breathy vs. modal voice quality...

Plosives in Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Marathi display a 4-way contrast involving the two dimensions of voicing and aspiration. While many studies are available on the acoustics of aspiration in unvoiced stops due to their more universal presence in the world’s languages, voiced aspirated plosives have been less studied. Rather than the release duration cue of aspiration in unvoiced...

In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and fricatio...

In this paper, we describe some consonantal and prosodic influences on vowel duration in Korean. In particular, the effect of different obstruents on the duration of following vowels was examined. With a large set of artificial utterances recorded by a single speaker, we studied four factors on vowel duration: the pre-vocalic context, the post-vocalic context, clause-final lengthening and phras...

Many cross-language perceptual models consider allophonic distributions in predicting the pattern of cross-language perception. Allophonic processes, however, are related to not only the existence of particular phonetic events but also to their linkage to the particular context in which such phonetic events occur. This study investigated how the determination of context and allophonic variation...

In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g. /beddo/ → [betto] ‘bed’). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on ...

This experiment tested whether locus equation coefficients, slope, and y-intercept could serve as indices of place of articulation for obstruents sharing the same place of articulation across different manner classes. Locus equations for 22 speakers were derived from CV/t/ words with initial voiced stop /d/, voiceless aspirated stop /t/, nasal /n/, voiced fricative /z/, and voiceless fricative ...