Volume 35, Issue 4

The work analyses the way in which the ‘rehilamiento’ presents itself. It presents itself as an acoustic stochastic field, superposed on an acoustic periodic field, as a consequence of two articulatory constrictions: the one at the oscillating vocal cords and the other at any place in the pharynx. The auditory perception of the ‘rehilamiento’ is simply one of voiced friction. The oscillograms presented confirm that in the language of Buenos Aires the realization of [ž] tends to conserve its voiced quality among men while losing it among women.

In order to assess the degree and nature of the dependence of the perception of prominence on the ways in which prominence-lending features are employed in the native language of the listener, a language-neutral test was developed to measure the relative contributions of fundamental frequency, intensity and duration to the perception of prominence. In this report, the test is described and the results of an experiment with Dutch listeners discussed. These results can serve as a basis for comparison with results obtained from listeners with different language backgrounds.