Volume 41, Issue 4

It is possible that the distinction between voiceless lateral fricatives and approximants is actually due to different linguists’ terminology and transcription practices rather than to an actual phonetic distinction. This paper establishes that there is in fact a phonetic distinction between these sounds and that the phonetic difference has important phonological consequences. Several speakers of Zulu, Navajo, Taishan, Burmese, and Tibetan were recorded. Measures of duration, amplitude and spectral shape were made on the voiceless laterals. The voiceless lateral fricatives were found to have a significantly later onset of voicing, higher amplitude, and greater energy at higher frequencies than the approximants. A survey of 60 languages with voiceless laterals revealed distinguishing generalizations involving phonotactics, allophonic variation, and co-occurrence with other laterals in the inventory.

A language’s use of the phonetic vowel space depends not only on how many vowel phonemes the language has, but on how each phoneme varies allophonically across contexts. This study tests the hypothesis that Japanese vowel allophones, measured from a wide range of contexts, will not fill the vowel formant space. This was predicted because Japanese has few vowel phonemes, distributed unevenly in the vowel space, and has no obvious processes of vowel reduction. Formant frequencies of vowel tokens from word lists and from read texts were compared for 7 speakers. These data show that, in Japanese, vowel allophones in prose fill in the vowel formant space more than allophones in word lists do, mainly as a result of centralization of the prose tokens. The use of the total formant space is determined in part by the distribution of phonemes, and in part by allophone centralization.

Previous research has provided conflicting findings regarding the phonological characteristics of adult-child speech, with some studies reporting more phonetic clarification and others greater unintelligibility. The present study examined the speech of 10 mothers to their young children (age 15–18 months) and found that a variety of speech styles was used, ranging along a continuum from slow, carefully articulated speech to rapid, casual speech. Each style was associated with particular linguistic and situational contexts. Phonological characteristics of the two styles are described and hypotheses regarding the effect of the observed variability on language acquisition are discussed.

It is by now well established that during normal conversation talkers often produce large variation in the rate at which they speak. However, existing research suggests that this modification is largely due to changes in the amount of pausing during conversation, and much less to actual changes in articulation rate, that is, the rate at which the speech itself is produced. In an attempt to examine this issue further, we used a modified measurement procedure to reanalyze the speech data from 30 talkers in an interview situation. In contrast to the earlier analyses, we found that there was indeed substantial variation in articulation rate for these speakers, even within a single utterance of a single talker. The implications of these findings for theories of segmental perception and for models of speech planning are discussed.

Binomial expressions, of the form X and Y, often prefer one sequence of elements over the other. This investigation examines the hypothesis that such preferences are due, in part at least, to phonetic properties of the conjoined words. Native speakers revealed highly significant preference patterns when asked to judge conjoined CVC syllables, in English, German and Afrikaans – patterns which could be associated with phonetic properties of the vowel segments. The prosodic structure of the binomial expression also appeared to play a role in determining order preferences.