Band 31, Heft 3-4

The author sets out to reconsider the relationships between stress and quantity in Icelandic. He comes to the conclusion that since in Icelandic the same line separates stress from non-stress and the long from the short, there is no need to introduce both length and stress into the phonological description of this language. The only objective criterion of classifying Icelandic syllables is the so-called quantitative peak. Icelandic, as well as all the other Germanic languages and Russian, shows that stress does not just mark off a syllable as a physical entity; it rather turns it into a plaything of other forces: phonematic or prosodic, as the case may be.

This paper analyses the different temporal variables of English and French in a similar linguistic task, namely radio-interviews. Both languages show a great deal of similarities, but differ considerably with regard to silent pauses and the distribution of the secondary variables. A tentative explanation for these differences is given; it is partly based on the hypothesis that the two languages have the same over-all behaviour in view of a given linguistic task, but differ in the distribution of the simple variables. A compensation would therefore take place at the level of the simple variables leading to identical central values for the complex variables of the two languages.

This experiment in aural speaker identification attempts to ascertain the relative contributions of fundamental frequency and formant frequencies. Speech samples were four voiced, whispered, and low-pass filtered isolated vowels produced by eight male speakers. Twelve listeners were asked to make speaker identification choices from these stimuli. Utterances were subjected to acoustic analyses, and the parameters extracted were related to speaker identification confusions by rank order correlation techniques. Results indicate that both fundamental frequency and formant frequencies contribute (approximately equally) to speaker identification judgments.

It is felt that the air flow rate is largely determined by the nature of impedance caused to the pulmonic air stream by the opening state of the glottis. Thus it is assumed that the air flow rate is tied up with the phonation process. Sindhi uses voice, voicelessness, aspiration and breathy voice/murmur as four distinctive glottal positions to account for the linguistic oppositions. An attempt, therefore, has been made here to examine the air flow and provide a quantitative description of air flow rate vis-à-vis different phonation processes in the formation of stop consonants in Sindhi.

The purpose of this cinefluorographic study of a number of allophonic variations of English /l/ was to describe the articulatory characteristics of these variations and to assess factors which may be responsible for the variations. Three subjects produced a speech sample containing English words and phrases while the high speed cinefluorographic films were made. The observed variability centered around two allophone groups, the prevocalic and the post-vocalic, having different articulatory characteristics. The pre-vocalic productions showed a more anterior lingual position and faster speed of movement than was observed for the post-vocalic group. Consequently, the pre-vocalic allophones showed no undershoot of the anterior lingual contact, while the post-vocalics did show undershoot of this position. The syllabic /l/ productions displayed lingual configurations like the post-vocalic group and movement characteristics like those shown when /l/ is articulated in a pre-vocalic cluster. Variation within the three major allophone groups can be explained within current concepts of coarticulation and articulatory undershoot.

The influence of voiced and vo iceless consonants on the F_o of the stressed vowel in words with different tonal accents is studied. Peak F_o of the vowel is circa 15 Hz lower after voiced than after unvoiced consonants; the influence of the preceding consonant is, however, not confined to the beginning of the vowel but still present near its end. The interval from vowel onset to F_o peak increases circa 25 msec when the preceding consonant is changed from voiceless to voiced. When F_o curves for long and short vowels are compared the F_o peak is found to remain constant relative to the nearest boundary of the vowel. The variations are discussed in relation to the mechanisms which cause them to occur and to their role in the speech communication process.

Nooteboom discovered several quantitative rules describing the effects of stress and number of syllables in a word on the duration of the vowels of the words concerned. Our experiment has tried to prove the applicability of some of these rules to the German language.

In the first experiment, it was found that in Korean the duration of a consonant has a systematic relationship with the duration of the adjacent vowel. However, there is no indication that a syllable boundary affects the degree of influence on the durations of preceding or following vowels, which suggests that the syllable is not the unit of time programming in Korean. In the second experiment, it was argued that all the statistical results used to support the contention that individual segments are not the time programming units, are also compatible with the traditional view that segments are the units of time programming.

The paper contains a proposition of a method for classifying the natural languages according to the number of their segmental phonemes. In order to solve this problem the attempt is made to find the distribution of the random variable ‘number of segmental phonemes in the inventory’ for 600 languages. The hypothesis by Sigurd, according to which this distribution is a normal one, cannot be accepted. The author comes to the result that the distribution of the number of phonemes is a gamma distribution with the parameters p = 4 and b = 1.05. This result has to undergo further examination. After the form of the distribution has been established, a confidence interval is constructed which fixes the limits of the three intended classes. The author also discusses the possible linguistic-systematic value of the proposed classification.

This investigation presents evidence that in phonetic transcription the listener’s interpretation of the meaning of the speech signal influences how he hears it. Listeners who were asked to transcribe the same child speech sequences under two different meaning conditions changed their transcriptions when their interpretation of meaning was changed from treatment I to II. Treatment II transcriptions often included phonetic features which would be expected on the basis of the utterance meaning but were, in fact, not present in the acoustic signal. In most instances, however, knowledge of meaning helped the transcriber to improve his transcription, presumably by directing his attention to features of the signal which he had failed to notice during treatment I.