Band 75, Heft 3

Aim: We assessed the effect of lexical stress on the duration and quality of Spanish word-final vowels /a, e, o/ produced by American English late intermediate learners of L2 Spanish, as compared to those of native L1 Argentine Spanish speakers. Methods: Participants read 54 real words ending in /a, e, o/, with either final or penultimate lexical stress, embedded in a text and a word list. We measured vowel duration and both F1 and F2 frequencies at 3 temporal points. Results: stressed vowels were longer than unstressed vowels, in Spanish L1 and L2. L1 and L2 Spanish stressed /a/ and /e/ had higher F1 values than their unstressed counterparts. Only the L2 speakers showed evidence of rising offglides for /e/ and /o/. The L2 and L1 Spanish vowel space was compressed in the absence of stress. Conclusion: Lexical stress affected the vowel quality of L1 and L2 Spanish vowels. We provide an up-to-date account of the formant trajectories of Argentine River Plate Spanish word-final /a, e, o/ and offer experimental support to the claim that stress affects the quality of Spanish vowels in word-final contexts.

This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokémon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokémon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight - Pokémon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns.

Background/Aims: There is growing evidence that coarticulation development is protracted and segment-specific, and yet very little information is available on the changes in the extent of coarticulation across different phonemes throughout childhood. This study describes lingual coarticulatory patterns in 6 age groups of Scottish English-speaking children between 3 and 13 years old. Methods: Vowelon-consonant anticipatory coarticulation was analysed using ultrasound imaging data on tongue shape from 4 consonants that differ in the degree of constraint, i.e., the extent of articulatory demand, on the tongue. Results: Consonant-specific age-related patterns are reported, with consonants that have more demands on the tongue reaching adolescent-like levels of coarticulation in older age groups. Within-speaker variability in tongue shape decreases with increasing age. Conclusion: Reduced coarticulation in the youngest age group may be due to insufficient tongue differentiation. Immature patterns for lingual consonants in 5- to 11-year-olds are explained by the goal of producing the consonant target overriding the goal of coarticulating the consonant with the following vowel.