Volume 36, Issue 3

The study investigates voice onset time (VOT) in German stop consonants and its relationship to place of articulation in a variety of phonetic environments. The outstanding findings are the consistently lowest values for the alveolars and the particular susceptibility of the VOT of bilabials to environmental variables like position in the utterance and stress. Highest values for velar stops are only achieved in initial position and medially before stress. Airflow measurements suggest a direct relationship between VOT and rate of articulation and airflow.

The ability of children, adolescents and adults to employ completely novel phonetic information was examined. Three groups of subjects were tested for their ability to identify minimal pairs contrasting voiced and implosive stops in syllable-initial position. Children’s performance on this task was significantly superior to both adolescent and adult performance.

Velar elevation data were collected for 12 utterance pairs contrasting in vowel quality. It is well-known that velar position for any phonetic segment is determined by at least two factors: the nature of the segment itself and the phonetic environment in which the segment occurs. Thus, velar elevation increases through the series of segment types: nasals, open vowels, close vowels, obstruents; and velar elevation for English vowels is affected by adjacent nasals. In these data, vowel quality was found to affect velar position during adjacent consonants: that is, the velum was lower for both nasals and obstruents in an environment of open vowels than in an environment of close vowels.

The spectral analysis of the 14 Spanish diphthongs was undertaken under two different speaking rates. The central frequency and relative intensity of the first (F1) and second (F2) formant were measured as well as the duration of the onset and offset steady states, the transition between them, and the total duration of the diphthong. The values in hertz per millisecond for the rate of change of the F2 transition were also obtained. Results show that the formant pattern, rate of change and temporal relations between both steady states contribute to the characterization of Spanish diphthongs; the distinction between diphthongs and vowel sequences in hiatus depends on the temporal relationship.

In ‘A Prosodic Typology for Swedish Dialects’ (Nordic Prosody 1978), Bruce and Gårding proposed a schema for generating fundamental frequency patterns of statements in four Swedish dialects. Dialectal variation was obtained by timing word accents and sentence accent differently in a common frame expressing statement intonation. In addition to presenting the method, this paper also shows how it can be applied to two different interrogative frames, one for yes/no questions with non-inverted word order and one for inverted order.