Volume 39, Issue 6

8 speakers of American English produced utterances consisting of one to five disyllables ([bábÓ] or [pápÓ]). Vowel and stop closure intervals were defined by variations in supraglottal pressure, sensed through a thin tube inserted in the mouth. Closure was always longer for /p/ than /b/ in utterance-medial positions. In utterance-initial position, however, /b/ lengthened more than /p/ so that no duration difference between /p/ and /b/ was observed. Utterance-initial position did not influence vowel duration. In contrast, utterance-final position affected only vowel duration, lengthening both final-syllable unstressed vowels and stressed vowels in penultimate syllables.

Recent investigations on the perception of the temporal course ol speech have dealt with stress-beat phenomena and isochrony and also with ‘momentary tempo’. In our attempts to reproduce and modify some of the experiments undertaken by Ventsov on ‘momentary tempo’ we came to the conclusion that statements on ‘momentary tempo’ cannot be formulated in terms of closed syllable duration or vowel onset to vowel onset interval either, but rather in terms of an articulatory theory similar to the one proposed by Menzerath and de Lacerda using the notion of ‘point of Koartikulation’.

The author compiles remarks by E. Sievers on concepts such as sound, sound system, differentiating feature etc., which prove that Sievers must be included among the pioneers of modern phonology.

The first ‘International Congress of Phonetics’ took place in Hamburg in 1914, the second in Bonn in 1930. The ‘International Congress of Phonetic Sciences’ of 1932 in Amsterdam, in which the circle of phonologists took part for the first time, was therefore the third phonetic congress. At this congress, the ‘Permanent Council’ was founded, which thus celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year.