this study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in english produced by persian speakers learning english as a foreign language. the four most reliable phonetic correlates of english lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five english disyllabi...

this paper addresses the validity of two hypotheses concerning changes of vowel quality in persian. the theory of centralization claims that there is a strong correlation between vowel duration and vowel quality. as vowel duration is shortened in unstressed contexts, the size of the vowel inventory reduces toward the center, leading to considerable overlap between different categories and a red...

Recent work on phonological vowel reduction explains some of its properties by appeal to proposed functional bases (Flemming 1995 [2002], to appear, Crosswhite 2001, to appear, Barnes 2002). This paper explores the feasibility of a Dispersion Theory (DT) account for Russian vowel reduction. No detailed analysis of a case of vowel reduction exists in DT. Also new here is an attempt to base such ...

Morphophonological alternations in English words such as able versus ability involve changes in both stress and vowel quality. This study examined how native speakers of Spanish and English produced four such morphologically related English word pairs. Degree of stress and vowel quality was assessed auditorily and instrumentally. Stress placement generally seemed to constitute less of a learnin...

Ten adult Brazilian Portuguese speakers were recorded producing the same words in contexts of relatively high and low semantic predictability. Significant vowel reduction in the former context was uncovered in the case of two of the three vowel types examined. The reduction of these vowels, /e/ and /a/, was both spectral and temporal. We describe some subtle parallels and differences between th...

This paper reports on a study of vowel reduction in contemporary Standard Dutch. The focus is on the first, unstressed syllable of four bisyllabic Dutch words: moment, manier, probeer(t) and docent. Vowel reduction is studied in a corpus of spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch, produced by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch. Three labelers independently evaluated and scored the stimuli on...