Volume 54, Issue 1

Confusions in vowel quality and in speaker sex for whispered and phonated versions of the long vowels of Swedish have been analysed. The recognition rate was higher than that obtained in other studies, and this is attributed to the use of real words (letter names). The recognition of vowel quality was observed to interact with that of speaker sex in the whispered versions, but not in the phonated ones. The paper also reports on F₀ and the frequency positions of the first three formants, and their dynamics, as well as on the overall spectral shape of the vowels. Intrinsic pitch and the observed upward shift of the lower formants in whispering as well as the spectral level differences agree largely with those found in other languages. Discrepancies and similarities with previous descriptions of the Swedish vowels are discussed.

It is well known that tones assimilate in much the same way as consonants and vowels do. In tonal assimilation, the height and shape of a given tone is altered by adjacent tones. Earlier studies on tonal assimilation in Thai have used two-tone sequences with an intervening obstruent between the two tones of interest. In the present study, three-tone sequences were used with continuously voiced syllables throughout the utterance. Assimilatory effects were expected to be greater between F₀ contours of two successive syllables that are continuous in voicing across the syllable boundary. Stimuli consisted of 125 possible three-tone sequences of the five Thai tones, superimposed on monosyllabic words in a carrier sentence. All syllables were stressed in order to eliminate potentially confounding interactions between stress and tonal assimilation. Acoustic analysis revealed that perseverative effects were assimilatory in nature; anticipatory effects, however, were dissimilatory in nature. Perseverative effects appear to be independent of tonal categories, and restricted to contiguous tones. Perseverative effects extend through more than half the duration of the following tone. Both the height and shape of the tones are affected. Anticipatory effects, on the other hand, are limited to the high and rising tones, and extend through less than half the duration of the preceding tone.

The goal of this paper is to test whether the palatal nasal stop /n/, occurring in several Romance languages, Hungarian and Czech, is a two-gesture, complex segment (produced with a tongue front closure and intentional tongue dorsum raising) or else a one-gesture, simple segment (articulated at the alveoloprepalatal zone with a single tongue portion including the lamina and predorsum). In order to investigate this issue, electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer data were collected on apical, laminal and dorsal movement data for Catalan /n/ and Russian palatalized alveolar /n^j/ (which is known to be a complex segment); other sound classes of both languages were also recorded, namely, the simple palatal segment /j/ and the two-segmental cluster /nj/. Time lags between position maxima at the tongue front and at the tongue dorsum argue strongly in favor of /n/ being a simple segment: they were found to be considerably shorter for /n/ than for /n^j/; moreover, those for /n^j/ were significantly longer than those for /j/ in Russian but not so in Catalan. In conjunction with linguopalatal contact data from the literature, it is argued that a longer time lag for /n/ vs. /j/ is representative of an unintentional, transitional event resulting from the alveoloprepalatal closure release for the former consonant occurring at the alveolar zone earlier than at the prepalatal zone.