Volume 36, Issue 2

An aerodynamic investigation of the occurrence of intrusive stop consonants occurring in nasal-fricative consonant clusters in English revealed that intrusive stops were cued perceptually by silent gaps often followed by burst releases preceding the fricative consonant. In articulatory-aerodynamic terms, intrusive stops appear to result from a prolonged oral occlusion of the nasal stop which is released with a vigorous burst release just prior to complete formation of the following fricative slit constriction.

An analysis of the breathing patterns of speakers in a variable-rate reading task shows that the duration and frequency of breathing pauses are dependent both on the rate of speaking and the syntactic nature of the pause location. Non-breathing pauses follow the same pattern of occurrence as breathing pauses, but are always shorter and tend to occur primarily at minor constituent breaks. At slow and normal rates, speakers accommodate their need to inhale to the preplanned pause patterns. At fast rates, however, the physiological need to breathe is the sole determinant of pausing.

In this article we describe an investigation into the proprioceptive articulatory similarity often German vowels. When processed with a multidimensional scaling technique, the similarity scores of 46 subjects led to the construction of a proprioceptive space, the dimensions of which are discussed in this article. The application of a hierarchical Cluster Analysis resulted in three main clusters, which we labelled front, middle and back. The vowels of the same cluster show a higher similarity than vowels taken from different clusters. The dimensions of the proprioceptive space and the classes resulting from the cluster analysis are correlated with some physical features of the vowels in question.

A concentrated study of the various utterance forms used by a single subject during the period 1 year, 11 months to 2 years, 1 month indicates that they interdigitate in a manner that is interesting both from structural and paradigmatic viewpoints. Consonant harmony is shown to have priority over vowel harmony and both are crucially dependent on the presence of an initial /C-/, exclusive of the optional glides [?] and [h]. Medial and final /C/s are seen to be preferentially dental (with final palatalisation) and final /V/ to be preferentially [i], i.e. also palatal. Final /C/ contrasts develop first in the /VC/ structure and differential /V/ systems in forms containing /VV/ sequences or in the /VCV/ structure.

The phonological interpretation of sound groups depends on the distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Since the segmentability of phonemes is based, not upon substitution (in absentia), but upon implementation (in praesentia) of distinctive features, the monophonematic interpretation of phoneme combinations has to be made in the same way. If we admit, differing from Trubetzkoy, the neutralization of multilateral oppositions and the existence of ‘omnilateral’ oppositions based upon the invariance of phonemic category, we may interpret certain combinations of two phonemes as an implementation of three phonematic units: each phoneme is considered as an archi phoneme and a constituent of a new phoneme, resulting from neutralization of a syntagmatic contrast.