Languages vary not only in terms of their sound inventory, but also in the phonological status certain sound distinctions are assigned. For example, while vowel nasality is lexically contrastive (phonemic) in Quebecois French, it is largely determined by the context (allophonic) in American English; the reverse is true for vowel tenseness. If phonetics and phonology interact, a minimal pair of ...

In Dutch, the phonological relation between the labiodental spirant approximant [ʋ], found in word-initial position, and the labial–velar semi-vowel [w], found in word-final position, has been a subject of interest for several scholars. Most of them agree that these two sounds should be regarded as allophonic variants of the phoneme /ʋ/. This assumption, however, has never been tested empirical...

This study was designed to identify English speech contrasts that might be appropriate for the computer-based auditory-visual training of Spanish learners of English. It examines auditory-visual and auditory consonant and vowel confusions by Spanish speaking students of English and a native English control group. 36 Spanish listeners were tested on their identification of 16 consonants and 9 vo...

In this contribution we propose a segmental duration model for the Galician language. We have focused our work on the study of allophonic durations in their syllabic environment. Firstly, a study of the speech rate over a recorded corpus led us to consider different behaviours in certain types of sentences. Secondly, the corpus was analyzed in order to determine the main factors affecting durat...

Moving from traditional dialectological literature and inspired by contemporary research on rhotics, in this paper we present preliminary data on the distribution and the articulation of /r/ in Tyrolean, an under-researched South Bavarian dialect. Two speakers produced a comprehensive selection of Tyrolean words containing /r/. They uttered up to five different uvular rhotics: [χ, ʁ, ʁ̞, ρ, ʀ]. ...

Despite many acoustic, articulatory and phonological studies of Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) vowel contrasts harmony, the perception ATR by speakers languages with distinctions are lacking. This paper explores how vowels which differ for or height, both, distinguished Akan, a Kwa language Ghana. We examine whether contrastive status impacts it is driven acoustic similarity. Results from two exper...