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 ...

Colour harmony was investigated using direct visual observations of computer simulated displays and compared with predictions of different colour harmony theories. Ou and Luo [1] constructed a model of colour harmony (CH formula) based on a harmony pair comparison experiment. The present paper compares our results with harmony predictions of the CH formula, and of colour harmony models based on...

0. Introduction This study documents and analyzes opacity in the coronal harmony of Kinyarwanda. This harmony presents several features of interest. First, the existence of opacity in coronal harmony is rare: to the best of our knowledge it has only previously been reported in Sanskrit’s nasal retroflex harmony. In Kinyarwanda the harmony audibly affects only sibilants, and it is blocked by cor...

Harmony systems are often described in the linguistic literature in a highly schematic and somewhat idealized fashion. Further, instances of disharmony within harmony languages typically have been treated as exceptional or anomalous, rather than as a natural and expected part of the harmony system. In documenting several vowel harmony languages indigenous to Siberia, we found both highly patter...

The present study examines two methods for learning and modeling vowel harmony from text corpora. The first uses Expectation Maximization with Hidden Markov Models to find the most probable HMM for a training corpus. The second uses pointwise Mutual Information between distant vowels in a Boltzmann distribution, along with the Minimal Description Length principle to find and model vowel harmony...

The two most controversial aspects of vowel harmony in Korean ideophones are its morphologically restricted nature and the harmonic feature governing these alternations. Not only is the harmony pattern restricted to the ideophone class2, but also the value of the harmonic feature determines the meaning of the ideophone itself. While alternations from one feature to another involve relative lowe...