Volume 37, Issue 3

Breaking in West Frisian is a process where falling diphthongs [iÉ™], [iÉ™], [uÉ™] and [oÉ™] are converted to the corresponding rising (broken) diphthongs [jr], [jε], [wo] and [wa] under the influence of a following syllable or consonant cluster. The length of various diphthongs in several pairs of morphologically related words was measured for ten speakers, and the duration of the broken or unbroken diphthong in the derived word was compared with that of the base word. We found that there was reduction in the length of the diphthong in all cases where another syllable was added. The degree of shortening depended on factors such as the phonetic environment, the nature of the diphthong and the type of suffix which was affixed. Several tentative conclusions were reached regarding the relationship of shortening and breaking and the historical development of the process.

In a previous analysis word boundaries have been denied any influence upon the course of fundamental frequency in the stress groups of Advanced Standard Copenhagen Danish. A small experiment has been carried out which supports this contention but which also suggests that in more conservative standards word boundaries may affect F_° patterns.

Fiberscopic films and audio recordings were made of two native speakers of Hindi, producing # Ci, iCi, iC# utterances where C was one of the four types of stops and affricates. The voiced unaspirated type showed voicing through the whole consonant and no ab-/adduction gesture. The other three types, in the intervocalic case, all showed an ab-/adduction gesture, but the timing and the amplitude of this gesture differed for the three types. For the voiceless unaspirated type, the gesture started at the beginning of the consonant and ended at the release, whereas for the voiced aspirated type, it started at the release and ended at the end of the consonant. For the voiceless aspirated type, it started and ended with the consonant, reaching a glottal width approximately double of the latter two types. Similar results were obtained in initial and final position. Voice onset time values and durations of oral closure are examined. Pros and cons of the terms ‘voiced aspirated’, ‘murmured aspirated’, and ‘voiced phonoaspirated’ are discussed. Finally a mechanism underlying stop production is suggested.

Young children frequently substitute stops for fricative-stop clusters. In this paper, we report acoustic measurements for children’s intended voiced and voiceless stops, and for stops substituting for clusters. Judging from voice-onset time measurements, children employ various strategies for assigning phonological status to the substituted stops.

The subject’s task was to listen to continuous utterances and to press a reaction-time (RT) button upon hearing an assigned phoneme target. Stimulus materials were utterances of 7–13 syllables in length excised from tape-recorded spontaneous speech; each contained a target located in early, middle or late positions in the utterance. Either 200 msec of silence was tape-spliced into the utterance 33, 67, or 100 msec prior to the target, or the utterance was left intact (as spoken). The main results were faster RT to targets following the silent interval by 33 msec than to targets in the intact version or targets following the silent interval by 100 msec, that is, facilitative effects on target RT varied directly with proximity to target of silent interval. As with previous results using citation-form stimulus materials, these results were interpreted in terms of information from anticipatory coarticulation provided to the subject in advance, permitting extra time to allow the target to be anticipated across the silent interval.

With the aid of a two-mass model of the vocal source loaded by the input impedance of the vocal tract, we first study theoretically, then by simulation, the effects of source-vocal tract coupling on the intrinsic frequencies F₀ of the French oral vowels. We explain the correlation which exists between F₀ and the frequency of the first formant as well as the results from the experiment described by Ishizaka and Flanagan [1972]. In conclusion, we show that the acoustic coupling cannot explain the different values of F₀, intrinsic in the vowels, but on the contrary, a physiological coupling has to compensate for the effects of acoustic coupling to explain the characteristics revealed in natural speech.