Volume 58, Issue 4

It is usually claimed that statement high rises in Australian English are more or less phonetically identical to yes/no question rises. In this paper, statement high rises and question rises were examined in a corpus of controlled spontaneous speech (i.e. map task dialogues) to see if this is the case. It appears that speakers in this study used different kinds of rises for declaratives and questions. The majority of statement high rises were realized with a low pitch accent onset, whereas almost all question rises were produced with high pitch accent onsets. High-range fall-rises also appeared to be used by some speakers in the same way as statement high rises. Implications of these findings for the current ToBI analysis of Australian English are considered.

After a brief summary of Hans Basbøll''s mora analysis of Danish stød, the results of an acoustic analysis of – primarily – consonant duration are reported. In natural running speech postvocalic stød bearing (moraic) sonorant consonants are not – as might be expected from previous investigations – systematically longer across positions than the corresponding stødless (non-moraic) consonants; therefore, in modern standard Copenhagen Danish, the moraic/non-moraic distinction in consonants is qualitative, not straightforwardly quantitative, as it is in vowels. Further, the results of an analysis of consonant duration in schwa assimilation are reported. The importance of citation form speech material versus more natural running speech is discussed.

This study examined the distribution of allophonic variants [t], [I] or [U], of medial /t/ using a corpus of conversational speech. We utilized a large conversational speech database to generate statistics about the frequency of occurrence of medial flaps. Results confirmed the prevalence of flapping in American English. Low frequency words showed a redistribution of variants from [U] to [t] compared to dominant flapping in high frequency words. A similar redistribution of variant production occurred for morphologically complex words (e.g. dirty) compared with morphologically simple words (e.g. water). A second analysis examining vowel length prior to medial /t/ and medial /d/ showed that, while both stops were pronounced as a flap, the vowel preceding medial /d/ tended to the longer. These results were discussed in reference to potential processes in recognizing spoken words.