Volume 58, Issue 1-2

Japanese is often called a ‘mora-timed’ language, and contrasted with ‘stress- timed’ or ‘syllable-timed’ languages. The definition of what constitutes mora-timing has undergone several revisions, and a wide variety of experimental evidence both for and against mora-timing has been presented. This article reviews the hypotheses, the means of testing them, and the results of nearly 40 years of experimental work on mora-timing in Japanese, and suggests directions for future work in this area.

Fundamental frequency (F₀) peak delay (henceforth peak delay) refers to the phenomenon that an F₀ peak sometimes occurs after the syllable it is associated with either lexically or prosodically. Although peak delay has been reported for various languages, the mechanism of its occurrence has so far remained unclear. In Mandarin, peak delay has been found to occur regularly in the rising (R) tone but not in the high (H) tone. The present study investigates the underlying mechanisms of peak delay by examining its relationship with tone, tonal context, and speech rate. An experiment was conducted to test the possibility that peak delay may occur also in the H tone in Mandarin if the H-carrying syllable is sufficiently shortened. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese recorded three types of sentences each containing a H, a R, or a weakened H tone. The sentences were produced at three speech rates: normal, fast and slow. Analysis of F₀ contours and peak alignment revealed that at normal speech rate, peak delay occurred regularly in both the R and weakened H tones but only occasionally in the H tone; at slow speech rate, peak delay continued to occur regularly in the R tone but only occasionally in weakened H and rarely in the H tone; at fast speech rate, peak delay occurred not only regularly in the R and weakened H tones, but also frequently in the H tone. Results of F₀ contour alignment analysis indicate that peak delay occurs when there is a sharp F₀ rise near the end of a syllable, regardless of the cause of the rise. The finding of this study provides support for the view that, rather than due to actual misalignment between underlying pitch units and segmental units, much of the variability in the shape and alignment of F₀ contours in Mandarin is attributable to the interaction of underlying pitch targets with tonal contexts and articulatory constraints.

There has been little systematic description of the intonation of English accents other than RP and General American. In the first part of this article the characteristics of the tones of Mancunian intonation are described together with a functional categorisation of these tones, in which a dichotomy is proposed between Open and Closed varieties. In the second part the description is related to the current model of intonation known as ToBI and the inadequacies of a representation of Mancunian tones in a standard and a modified form of ToBI are revealed. A more radical modification of the ToBI approach based on tonal features is proposed.

Eight speakers (4 male and 4 female) of the Muskogee dialect of Creek pronounced a set of words illustrating the vowels and diphthongs of Creek. These recordings were analyzed acoustically and data on vowel duration and vowel formant frequencies are presented in this paper. The ratio of the durations of dictinctively long and short vowels was 1.8. This ratio showed a sex difference, being larger for female speakers than it was for male speakers. Final lengthening was also observed: both distinctively long and short vowels were longer in word-final position than in word-initial position. The vowel formant data showed two additive, orthogonal phonetic vowel reduction processes: short vowel centralization and positional reduction. Short vowel centralization has been found in many languages. Distinctively long vowels in Creek tended to be more peripheral in the acoustic vowel space than were the distinctively short vowels. Positional reduction is also evident in these data: vowels in word-final position were reduced relative to vowels in word-initial position. Short vowel centralization was preserved in both positions in the word. Positional reduction has been documented in several languages, and these results from Creek lend support to the hypothesis that it is a general property of speech production. The results of this acoustic-phonetic study, the first such study of Creek, are discussed in light of cross-linguistic phonetic trends.

This study examined the identification of English consonants in noise by native speakers of Italian. The effect of age of first exposure to English was evaluated by comparing three groups of subjects who continued to use Italian relatively often but differed according to their age of arrival (AOA) in Canada from Italy (early: 7, mid: 14, late: 19 years). The subjects in the late group made more errors identifying word-initial consonants than subjects in the early group did; however, the effect of AOA was nonsignificant for word-final stops. The effect of amount of native language (L1) use was evaluated by comparing two groups of early bilinguals who were matched for AOA (mean = 7 years) but differed according to self-reported percentage use of Italian (early: 32%, early-low: 8%). The early bilinguals who used Italian often (early) made significantly more errors identifying word-initial and word-final consonants than native English (NE) subjects did, whereas the early bilinguals who used Italian seldom (early-low) did not differ from the NE subjects. The subjects’ phonological short-term memory was estimated by having them repeat Italian non-words. This was done in an attempt to identify the source of individual differences. The nonword repetition scores were in fact found to independently account for 15% of the variance in subjects’ errors identifying word-final English consonants and 8% of the variance for word-initial consonants.