Volume 71, Issue 2

This study investigates acoustic correlates of English rhythmic patterns for 20 American English speakers (AS) and 42 Japanese learners of English (JS). The results indicate that for AS in an English sentence where monosyllabic content and function words alternate, the vowels in content words are over twice as long as those in function words, resulting in alternating long-short vowels. In contrast, the JS show no stress-related duration control and realize a similar rhythmic pattern mostly through recursive high-low fundamental frequency (F0). In a sentence with a sequence of content words in which 4 stressed syllables occur successively, the AS show recursion of strong-weak syllables by means of F0, intensity and first formant, whereas JS show inconsistent stress patterns. These results indicate that the AS apply different strategies for implementing rhythmic alternation depending on sentence stress patterns, and these strategies are different from those of JS. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel

We offer an acoustic study of variation in the realization of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. We consider the effects of phonological inventory (Catalan has a distinction between /s/ and /z/ that Spanish lacks) and position in word (i.e. effects of word boundaries). An analysis of a corpus of Map Task interviews in Catalan and Spanish revealed that Spanish word-medial and initial intervocalic /s/ segments are shorter than in Catalan. Whereas our results are consistent with the predictions of theories incorporating functional principles (i.e. contrast preservation), we also consider other possible explanations of the facts. The analysis also revealed that Spanish word-final intervocalic /s/ segments are weaker along the two dimensions that we examined (duration and voicing) than their initial and medial counterparts. We suggest that this apparently morphological effect on lenition has an articulatory explanation in terms of gestural coordination. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel

Electroglottographic data for word-final obstruents in C#C and CC#C sequences with a word-initial voiced consonant indicate that regressive voicing adaptation is a categorical and thus assimilatory process for most Catalan speakers. Word-final obstruents are planned as voiced since they exhibit full voicing or else an initial voicing period which is longer than the voicing lag associated with the vowel preceding the cluster. Segmental duration may also be used by speakers for realizing word-final obstruents as voiced in C#C but not in CC#C clusters. The phonetic implementation of voicing assimilation proceeds gradually: voicing for word-final obstruents differs considerably among speakers and is less for fricatives than for stops and whenever the word-initial consonant is an obstruent or an approximant than when it is a nasal, a lateral or an alveolar trill. The study also reveals that those C1 realizations which are less prone to acquire voicing show more token-totoken variability in voicing and segmental duration and therefore appear to be less tightly controlled by speakers. In conjunction with data from other studies, these Catalan data suggest that speakers and languages with prevoiced stops may differ with respect to the more or less gradient phonetic implementation of the regressive voicing assimilation process in heterosyllabic consonant clusters. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel