Voiceless Stops

This study is the first to explore from a cross-regional perspective acoustic phonetic features of preaspiration in both voiceless geminate and singleton stops in Italian, a language for which preaspiration is most typically associated with voiceless geminate stops. Frequency of preaspiration occurrence and duration are investigated in a controlled production experiment involving twelve speakers from two regional areas with different dialect substrata. Results reveal that preaspiration occurs for both geminates and singletons in both regions, with area-specific differences in frequency possibly linked to regional differences in phonetic voicing patterns of intervocalic singletons. We conclude that preaspiration in Italian stops may be best associated with phonetic voicing status, not phonological length.

Both Japanese and Kelantan Malay (KM) use consonant length contrastively, though they differ in terms of word position, i.e., Japanese permits the contrast in word-medial position, while KM restricts such a contrast to word-initial position only. It is thus of theoretical interest to examine the extent to which speakers of these languages process familiar consonant length contrasts (i.e., short/singleton vs long/geminate) in unfamiliar word position. To this end, we examined the perception of Japanese consonant length by KM participants who had no experience with Japanese. The KM and control Japanese participants responded to 200 trials via an AXB discrimination task. The overall mean discrimination accuracy was 84% and 99% for the KM and Japanese groups, respectively. While there was a clear between-group difference in discrimination accuracy, compared to participants from other first language backgrounds, it appears that the KM group benefitted from their experience with L1 consonant length.

This study examines voice onset time (VOT) for phonetically voiceless word-initial stops in Mandarin Chinese and in English, as spoken by 11 Mandarin speakers and 4 British English speakers. The purpose of this paper is to compare Mandarin and English VOT patterns and to categorize their stop realizations along the VOT continuum. As expected, the findings reveal that voiceless aspirated stops in Mandarin and in English occur at different places along the VOT continuum and the differences reach significance. The results also suggest that the three universal VOT categories (i.e. long lead, short lag, and long lag) are not fine enough to distinguish the voiceless stops of these two languages.

Studies on phonetic realization of phonological structure have revealed that certain lexical properties are reflected in fine details of speech production. Examples are vowel space expansion for words with dense neighbors, and VOT increase in voiceless stops for words with voicing minimal pairs. These lexical effects are primarily found in English, but there is much to explore in phonemically and prosodically different languages, such as Japanese. The present study investigated the duration of intervals around the burst of word initial velar stops in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese which has about 200 speakers’ annotations given by trained phoneticians. Minimal pair competitors and word familiarity data are drawn from an 80,000-word database. Results show significant effects of competitors on the duration of the following vowel and word familiarity on the closure duration, which suggest that lexical effects do exist in Japanese, but in a radically different manner from English.

Reviewed by Klaus Johan Myrvoll Michael Schultes Urnordisch er ei edrueleg innføring i språket i dei eldste nordiske runeinnskriftene. Schulte legg fram dette kompliserte materialet på ein både innsiktsfull og pedagogisk måte, som rettleider lesaren gjenom dei mange mine felti som finst i denne delen av runologien. Det er lagt vekt på å velja dei språk leg sét best grunngjevne tolkingane av innskriftene, m.a. av Ottar Grønvik (Runene på Tunesteinen [Oslo, 1981]) på s. 97-99 og Lillemor Santesson («En blekingsk blotinskrift: En nytolkning av inledningsraderna på Stentoftenstenen», Forn vännen 84 [1989]: 221-229) på s. 99 f. Det tyder likevel ikkje at den usemja og uvissa som trass i alt råder, vert løynt for lesaren. Tvert imot: Schulte gjer ofte eksplisitt greida for fleire mogelege tolkingar og peikar på fyremuner og ulempor med dei ulike løysingane, og han hev alltid rikeleg med tilvisingar til forskingslitteraturen. Ei glede leg sida ved denne boki er òg at Schulte konsekvent gjev att den femtande runa ᛉ som ʀ på tradisjonelt vis, og at han gjev gode argument for å gjera so (s. 32-34). Det er ei stutt og konsis bok Schulte hev skrive-snaude hundrad sidor um ein ser burt frå bibliografien og andre tillegg-, og ein kunde nok ha ynskt seg ei noko fyllugare framstelling i visse stykke, t.d. kunde utvalet av rune innskrifter i kap. 6 ha vore litt større. Boki er samansett av åtte delar eller kapittel, forutan fyreordet («Vorwort»), som litt pedantisk hev vorte tildelt kapittel «0» (s. 11 f.). Fyrst av dei eigenlege åtte kapitli er «1 Einführung», som gjev ei yversyn yver den urnordiske perioden, korpuset (dei urnordiske innskriftene) og andre sentrale tema som plasseringi av urnordisk innanfor dei germanske måli, den historisk-komparative metoden og spursmålet um språkleg variasjon innanfor dei urnordiske innskriftene (s. 13-37). Eg kjem attende til dette um litt. Hovuddelen av boki er uppbygd av fire kapittel som fylgjer ei klassisk grammatisk innbolking: Fyrst kap. 2, «Phonologie des Urnordischen», med utgreiding um vokalisme og konsonantisme og med innføring i sentrale ovringar som synkope, umljod og brjoting (s. 38-64; av einkvan grunnen stend det «Phonologie des Frühurnordischen» i innhaldslista). Dinaest kap. 3, «Morphologie des Urnordischen», med nominal-og verbalbøygjing,

Acoustic data are presented from a prosodic database containing data from 3 French speakers. The prosodic boundaries examined are the Utterance, the Intonational Phrase, the Accentual Phrase, and the Word. The aim is to study the interaction of coarticulatory effects with prosodic effects. The vowel /a/ before the prosodic boundary and the consonants /b d I f s 5/ after the prosodic boundary are examined. It is found that the vowel duration is greatly affected by the strength of the prosodic boundary, but consonant duration less so. The duration of the fricative consonants is more stable than the stop consonants. Formant values suggest that /a/ is lower and more back the stronger the prosodic boundary, and that the vowel is more likely to reach its low target following a bilabial consonant /b f/. Based on an examination of formant values, the velar stop /I/ appears to have much variability in the front-back dimension. Finally, there is a strong negative correlation between duration and mean velocity of the formant transition, and this effect is strongly related to the strength of the prosodic boundary.

The present study examines possible temporal effects of the word-initial geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) beyond the duration of the target consonant itself. We are interested in identifying any duration interactions with following vowels that ...

Studies on phonetic realization of phonological structure have revealed that certain lexical properties are reflected in fine details of speech production. Examples are vowel space expansion for words with dense neighbors, and VOT increase in voiceless stops for words with voicing minimal pairs. These lexical effects are primarily found in English, but there is much to explore in phonemically and prosodically different languages, such as Japanese. The present study investigated the duration of intervals around the burst of word initial velar stops in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese which has about 200 speakers’ annotations given by trained phoneticians. Minimal pair competitors and word familiarity data are drawn from an 80,000-word database. Results show significant effects of competitors on the duration of the following vowel and word familiarity on the closure duration, which suggest that lexical effects do exist in Japanese, but in a radically different manner from English.

This paper looks for an interpretation of the phonetic factors causing consonant lenition and elision to occur through an analysis of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan, a dialect of Catalan spoken in the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Articulatory and acoustic data for several Majorcan Catalan speakers still producing the palatal glide in all word positions and segmental environments show that the consonant is lower and more variable in intervocalic position than word initially and word finally. Lowering is enhanced by the presence of contextual low and mid low front vowels, mostly so if stressed and placed immediately after the palatal glide. Inspection of [VjV] formant trajectories reveals that, in spite of undergoing articulatory reduction, [j] is produced with an independent articulatory gesture; moreover, coarticulatory effects between the palatal glide and the following vowel may render the former phonetic segment perceptually indistinguishable from the latter and thus prone to undergo elision. Strongly lenited variants of intervocalic [j] appear to be receding, and conservative speakers show specially low realizations of the palatal glide which may have been widely spread among the speaking population at the time that the intervocalic consonant underwent systematic elision in some areas of Majorca in ther past. These findings are in support of the notion that the lenition and subsequent elision of intervocalic consonants are assisted by contextual and prosodic factors.

This study investigates two major factors that have been documented to affect the duration of segments. The influence of stress and utterance type on duration is examined for Vowel-Consonant-Vowel (VCV) sequences in Greek (V=i,a; C=p,t,s). In particular, the influence of these factors on the durations of VI, V2, C and VCV are examined. In addition, further analyses are reported for VOT and VTT (i.e., carryover voicing during the consonant). Statistical analyses are carried out with factorial ANOVAs on all the durations. The results show significant influence of both stress and utterance type on the durations examined. The empirical findings are discussed with reference to relevant literature.

Elicitation Materials. Subjects were given the same set of disyllabic real words in both English and Spanish in carrier phrases, which made the tokens closer to natural speech. This maintained control and comparability of the segments in the same environment, since vowel height and syllabic stress are known to affect aspiration (Keating, 1983). The English carrier phrase was "Say the word ___again," and the Spanish carrier phrase was "Diga la palabra ___otra vez." The tokens were limited to wordinitial voiceless stops, in all three places of articulation (labial, dental-alveolar, and velar) in a stressed syllable followed by a low back vowel. This paper presents the preliminary results from work in progress of a paired study of the acquisition of voiceless stops by Spanish speakers learning English and American English speakers learning Spanish. For this study the hypothesis was that the American speakers would have no difficulty suppressing the aspiration in Spanish unaspirated stops; the Spanish speakers would have difficulty acquiring the aspiration necessary for English voiceless stops, according to Eckman's Markedness Differential Hypothesis. The null hypothesis was proved. The results also reveal that a simple report of means will not distinguish the speakers and the respective language learning situation; measurements must also include the range of acceptability of VOT for phonetic segments. English Spanish #_a p posit 'propose' pago 'payment' t toddy 'type of drink' taza 'cup' k copper 'red metal' cada 'each, every'

This study examines the degree to which differences in amplitude and F0 can mark the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM). RMS amplitude and F0 values were measured for several consonant groups in utterance-initial and -medial positions. Results indicate that the contrast is reflected in systematic differences in the amplitude and F0 at the beginning of the following vowel. The findings support the view that, besides being primarily characterized by durational lengthening, word-initial geminates can be enhanced by non-durational correlates, such as amplitude and F0, particularly for voiceless stop tokens produced in utterance-initial position where domain-initial strengthening effects are also expected to be present.

The present study explores non-durational correlates of the word-initial voiceless stop singleton/geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM) by focusing on the relative values of amplitude and F0 across two syllables of disyllabic words. We are particularly interested in identifying any inter-syllabic differences that could potentially enhance the acoustic salience of voiceless stop geminates in utterance-initial position, given the lack of acoustic closure duration in this specific context. Results indicate that relative amplitude and relative F0 across syllables do contribute to the differentiation of word-initial voiceless stop singletons and geminates in KM, with amplitude and F0 ratios being usually significantly higher in the geminate context. The effect is further enhanced for utterance-initial tokens and it is also consistent across places of articulation. The conclusion is drawn that the word-initial voiceless stop length contrast in KM can also be characterized by differing ...

This paper presents the results of two tasks of perception of Kaqchikel stop consonants performed by two groups of multilingual learners of Kaqchikel. All learners spoke both Spanish and English but were differentiated based on which of those two was their first language.

Kaqchikel is a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala by approximately 400,000 people (Heaton & Xoyón, 2016). Like all Mayan languages, a primary distinction among its eight (8) stop consonants is one of glottalization (Bennett, 2016). At each of four places of articulation there are two stop phonemes: one glottalized (ejective or implosive) and one unglottalized (plain) phoneme.

Modelled after Wagner & Baker-Smemoe (2013), the first perception task was an AX discrimination task in which learners indicated whether pairs of Kaqchikel words were two pronunciations of the same word or two pronunciations of different words. The target difference among these words being between two of the eight stop phonemes of Kaqchikel. The second perception task was a categorization task wherein participants heard Kaqchikel words and categorized them based on what they thought their initial (first testing block) or final (second block) sound was, choosing from among Kaqchikel’s eight stop phonemes.

The L1 English learners were better at correctly discriminating Kaqchikel stop consonants than L1 Spanish learners, but only regarding Place of Articulation. This is surprising, as Spanish and English do not differ in their stops’ place features, both having three places of articulation while lacking Kaqchikel’s Uvular place. The groups did not differ in their detection of glottalization differences. In the second task, L1 English learners were more consistent than L1 Spanish learners in categorization of seven of the eight Kaqchikel phoneme categories. Taken together: despite all learners’ fluency in both Spanish and English, L1 English learners are better than L1 Spanish learners at distinguishing Kaqchikel stop consonants.

This paper looks for an interpretation of the phonetic factors causing consonant lenition and elision to occur through an analysis of intervocalic [j] in Majorcan, a dialect of Catalan spoken in the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Articulatory and acoustic data for several Majorcan Catalan speakers still producing the palatal glide in all word positions and segmental environments show that the consonant is lower and more variable in intervocalic position than word initially and word finally. Lowering is enhanced by the presence of contextual low and mid low front vowels, mostly so if stressed and placed immediately after the palatal glide. Inspection of [VjV] formant trajectories suggests that, in spite of undergoing articulatory reduction, [j] is produced with an independent articulatory gesture; moreover, coarticulatory effects between the palatal glide and the following vowel may render the former phonetic segment perceptually indistinguishable from the latter and thus prone to undergo elision. Strongly lenited variants of intervocalic [j] appear to be receding, and conservative speakers show specially low realizations of the palatal glide which may have been widely spread among the speaking population at the time that the intervocalic consonant underwent systematic elision in some areas of Majorca in the past. These findings are in support of the notion that the lenition and subsequent elision of intervocalic consonants are assisted by contextual and prosodic factors.

This study explores how articulation recovery might be accomplished in the absence of clear acoustic output consequences. Based on perception data from Tashlhiyt Berber utterance-initial voiceless singleton and geminate stops (e.g. tut vs. ttut), we show that auditory information alone is not sufficient for native listeners to elicit the standard perception performance expected from native listeners on a native contrast. Implications of the results on the general issue of the nature of speech targets are briefly discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine the phonetic interpretation of geminate contrast and the articulatory differences between the lexical and post-lexical geminates in Persian. In terms of two geminate types, the findings indicated that wordboundary geminates display the same temporal values as lexical geminates, however, unlike lexical geminate consonants, the phonetic implementation of adjacent identical consonants in word-boundary geminates are not allocated the feature [+tense]. Such phonologically difference affected the vowels preceding the two geminate types. Results from analyzing the qualitatively short and long vowels preceding the word-boundary geminates showed separate distributions for consonant sequences affected by different vowel types in which the tenseness of the vowel // and the duration of consonant sequences would result in considerable interaction. Contrary to RMS amplitude, formant frequencies as a robust secondary cue, could contribute to the perception of the vowel and consonant discrimination in two types of geminates in Persian. These results demonstrate that temporal compensation is maintained with the interaction between the preceding vowels and consonants in two geminate types. Duration as a primary correlate would be enhanced by Formant Frequency values as an additional acoustic correlate and increases the perceptual distance between the phonemic categories.

This study investigates whether the amplitude of release bursts is a potential cue to the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM). The voiceless stop series (/p-pp/, /t-tt/, /k-kk/) were examined in two different utterance conditions. Results show that release bursts for geminate stops were produced with significantly greater energy than those for singleton stops, suggesting greater articulatory efforts to mark gemination. Although the effects of prosodic context and stop place of articulation were noticeable, significant amplitude differences were preserved across utterance contexts. The findings support the role of spectral parameters, in particular release burst amplitude, in enhancing the short/long consonant contrast in this Malay variety.

This paper investigates the production of wordinitial geminate consonants in Kelantan Malay with a focus on voiceless stops. It presents an acoustic phonetic analysis examining two acoustic parameters: closure duration and voice onset time (VOT). Evidence from a production experiment indicates that there is a clear durational contrast between word-initial voiceless geminate stops and their singleton counterparts. Closure duration is found to be the most robust acoustic correlate for the singleton-geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay, while VOT shows highly significant effects.

The present study investigates non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g., geminate word palla "ball" vs singleton word pala "shovel"). This contrast is reportedly signaled by the duration of the singleton/geminate consonant and of the preceding vowel. Here, it is shown that the duration adjustment extends further to the word-initial consonant, e.g., the [p] in palla is significantly longer than that in pala (experiment 1). In experiment 2, an effect of syllable structure is ruled out, an unavoidable confound when comparing singleton and geminate words. The comparison of geminate words with cluster words (e.g., as palco "stage"), both of which have a closed first syllable, shows a similar lengthening. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.

Our study deals with the durational structure of Italian words with a medial geminate or singleton consonant (e.g., palla "ball" vs. pala "shovel"). Specifically, we investigated the duration of the word-initial consonant (e.g., [p]) and found that the onset consonant was longer in geminate than in singleton words. A comparison to German word pairs with a vowel length contrast in the first syllable (e.g., bitten "please" vs. bieten "bed") showed no such duration increase for the word-initial consonant [b]. On the basis of previous studies on long-distance anticipatory effects, we argue that the strength of the geminate articulation in Italian is already foreshadowed in the word-initial consonant, whereas the German vowel length contrast does not lead to such anticipatory duration differences. Our results hence provide evidence for a distinction between consonantal and vocalic subsystems for a different set of data.

The acoustic consequences of the articulatory reduction of consonants remain largely unknown. Much more is known about acoustic vowel reduction. Whether the acoustical and perceptual consequences of articulatory consonant reduction are comparable in kind and extent to the consequences of vowel reduction is still an open question. In this study we compare acoustic data for 791 VCV realizations, containing 17 Dutch intervocalic consonants and 13 vowels, extracted from read speech from a single male speaker, to otherwise identical segments isolated from spontaneous speech. Five acoustic correlates of reduction were studied. Acoustic tracers of articulation were based on F 2 slope dierences and locus equations. Speech eort was assessed by measuring duration, spectral balance, and the intervocalic sound energy dierence of consonants. On a global level, it shows that consonants reduce acoustically like vowels on all investigated accounts when the speaking style becomes informal or syllables become unstressed. Methods that are sensitive to speech eort proved to be more reliable indicators of reduction than F 2 based measures. On a more detailed level there are dierences related to the type of consonant. The acoustic results suggest that articulatory reduction will decrease the intelligibility of consonants and vowels in comparable ways.

This study examines the extent to which amplitude and F0 play secondary roles in perceptually cueing the word-initial singleton/geminate consonant contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM). Three voiceless stop word-pairs produced in isolation, i.e. utterance-initial position, were chosen for manipulation in three perception experiments involving KM native listeners. Results show that amplitude and F0 have limited perceptual functions on their own, although the combined values of the two parameters do have some effect on the perception of the consonant contrast. These results are expected for the utterance-initial voiceless stop pairs given the absence of closure duration information as a perceptual cue in this context. The findings support the view that the consonant length distinction in word-initial position, particularly for voiceless stops, can be potentially cued by a set of secondary parameters, e.g. amplitude and F0, alongside the primary acoustic parameter of closure duration.

In Italian, length contrast is exploited in the consonant system. Previous articulatory studies have focused on the temporal organization of gestures in Italian geminates and on the lower lip kinematics of the singleton/geminate distinction, and have showed that the time interval between the nuclei of two successive syllables does not depend on the number of intervening consonants (Öhman's Vowel-to-Vowel model) . In this paper, data on lip and tongue gestures from four Italian subjects saying "mima" and "mimma" at fast and comfortable rate of delivery are discussed in order to directly test the validity of the Öhman's model for the gestural organization of Italian geminate consonants.

Patal Majzul et al (2000) show that Kaqchikel, a Mayan language in the K’ichee’an branch, spoken by ~400,000 people in south-central Guatemala, exhibits vast phonological variation among both its consonants and its vowels. For the consonants, this includes a high degree of intraspeaker allophonic variation, with some consonants bearing two or three surface allophones, depending on their position in the syllable and word. The only consonants that do not participate in this variation are the three fricatives /s š x/. Plain and glottalized stops and affricates, as well as nasals and other sonorants, exhibit some degree of positional allophonic variation (Brown et al., 2006).
In this paper I re-present, re-provide acoustic documentation for, and re-analyze the allophony of plain stop and non-nasal sonorant consonants of Kaqchikel.
First, the four plain (as opposed to glottalized) stops are shown to each have a positional allophone of an aspirated (as opposed to unaspirated) stop. As noted in Bennett (2016) and Patal Majzul et al. (2000) this occurs in word-final position and, less-often, in word-medial, syllable-final position. I propose that this is due to implementation of a [Spread Glottis] ([SG]) feature at the right edge.
Converging evidence for this is provided by the allophony of the sonorants. In identical positions these typically voiced consonants devoice, according to most accounts. Alternatively, according to Brown et al. (2006), these allophones are voiceless fricatives at the same place of articulation.
Under this spirantization analysis, I unify these phonological processes at the right edge into a single process of [SG] insertion. This is done to the exclusion of the glottalized stops (as they have a counter-intuitive feature of [Constricted Glottis] ([CG]) (Fallon, 2002)), the fricatives (as they already have [SG] (Vaux, 1998; Avery & Idsardi, 2001)), and the nasals.
This work is being done under a larger project of study of the phonological acquisition of Kaqchikel by adults, including heritage learners. In turn, this sits within the larger context of language maintenance and revitalization, both actively, by analyzing acquisition of the language, and passively: As interest in learning, studying, and understanding Kaqchikel and other indigenous languages of the Americas grows in the scholarly world, so has it in the world of the hearts and minds of the rightful owners of these languages, their speakers and heritage bearers.

This study uses acoustic data from Spanish, English and Portuguese to determine how domain-initial effects impact unstressed syllables in languages that differ in how lexical stress affects segmental makeup. While previous work suggests domain-initial effects induce spatiotemporal changes only in the very first segment at a prosodic boundary, results from the analysis of 1,260 tokens produced by 52 speakers in this investigation indicate that domain-initial effects may operate on the stressed syllable instead, spreading leftwards towards the boundary in language-specific ways. These data provide new insights for investigations of how prosodic units are processed though segmental phonetic detail.

This paper examines the relationship between sound change and human perception errors that can be attributed either to undershoot of an articulatory gesture or, on the contrary, to the intrusion of an articulatory gesture. We discuss how such phenomena that characterize speech variability can lead to misperceptions that in turn can lead to sound change, resulting in the reorganization of a phonological system (cf. [1], [2]). In our study we analyze the acoustic manifestation of variable pronunciations in two modern Romance languages (Spanish and Romanian) that are generally assumed to differ in degree of articulatory undershoot. In all modern-day varieties of Spanish, consonant lenition, a result of undershoot, is pervasive. In Romanian it is relatively rare, whereas consonant deletion is widespread in spontaneous speech. In both languages, adjacent vowels tend to coalesce, and unstressed high vowels [i,u] become glides. Gestural intrusion is less common overall. We compare representative examples encountered in spontaneous speech in the two languages, and discuss them in the light of diachronic changes attested.

Voice Onset Time (VOT) is the time between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing (vibrations in the vocal cords). This time is measured in ms and is negative for voiced stops and positive for unvoiced stops. VOT of +75ms and more is considered to indicated an aspirated stop.
This BA thesis compares VOT of the fortis and lenis pairs of stop phonemes in Icelandic (which is normally considered to have unvoiced unaspirated vs unvoiced aspirated stop phonemes), Bulgarian (as all Slavic and Romance languages, it has voiced vs unvoiced stops) and Swedish (where the two phonemes in each pair have allophones that are either voiced, unvoiced unaspirated and unvoiced aspirated).
The figures for Icelandic and Swedish were taken from previous works. The author measured VOT in Bulgarian.

Eins og nafnið bendir til fjallar þessi ritgerð um hluta setningafraeðinnar, nánar tiltekið tilvísunarsetningar og tilvísunarorð. Með því að skoða stigveldi setningafraeðinnar má komast að mörgu varðandi sögulega þróun tungumála og hér verður litið aftur í tímann og tilurð tilvísunarsetninga rakin frá forníslensku til nútímamáls. Fyrst verður fjallað almennt um tilvísunarsetningar og einkenni þeirra, hvernig þaer eru flokkaðar og hvaða orð tengja þaer helst. Minnst er á rannsóknir fraeðimanna, erlendra og íslenskra, og út frá þeim rannsóknum fjallað um algengustu tilbrigði tilvísunarsetninga. Orðaröð í íslensku er stuttlega reifuð og þaðan vikið að tilvísunarorðum í forníslensku, í málinu við siðaskiptin og í nútímamáli með textadaemum. Að lokum er uppruni tilvísunarorðanna sjálfra rakinn frá germönsku til nútímans skv. aðferðum orðsifjafraeðinnar. 2. Tilvísunarsetningar Setningaliðir hafa allir eitt aðalorð, eða höfuð, og því getur fylgt ákvaeðisliður eða fylliliður. Setningaleg og merkingarleg einkenni orða ráða því í hvernig setningarliðum þau standa og um tilvísunarsetningar má almennt styðjast við eftirfarandi skýringu af wikipediu: " A relative clause is a kind of subordinate clause, one of whose arguments shares a referent with a main clause element on wich the subordinate clause is grammatically dependent. " 1 Á íslensku þýðir þetta gróflega að tilvísunarsetningar eru nokkurs konar aukasetningar sem deila sömu merkingu með aðalsetningarhluta; þaer skýra nánar þann setningarlið sem þaer standa með. Tilvísunarkerfið getur reynst býsna flókið og viðamikið og málvísindamenn um heim allan hafa rannsakað tilvísunarsetningar í hinum ýmsu tungumálum. Nú verður fjallað örlítið um rannsóknir sem hafa verið framkvaemdar og rýnt nánar í einkenni tilvísunarsetninga og þeirra smáorða sem þeim fylgja. 2.1 Einkenni og flokkun tilvísunarorða og tilvísunarsetninga Höskuldur Þráinsson skrifaði grein í Íslenskt mál um tilvísunarorð (1980) en meginmarkmið hans var þá að sýna fram á að villandi vaeri að kalla orðin sem og er tilvísunarfornöfn því þau hafa engin fornafnseinkenni. Nú, rúmum þrjátíu árum síðar, dettur fáum í hug að nefna 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause.

Khattab@ncl.ac.uk ; Jalal.Al-Tamimi@ncl.ac.uk This paper reports on phonetic and phonological patterns of gemination in Lebanese Arabic (LA) and on the temporal relationship between geminate consonants and vowel length. Six males and six females from Beirut were recorded reading target word-lists containing disyllables with medial singleton and geminate consonants preceded by long and short vowels. Acoustic and auditory analyses of medial consonants and of preceding and following vowels were conducted. Results show separate durational distributions for singleton and geminate consonants and for short and long vowels in word-list style. There was no evidence for the temporal compensation between medial consonants and preceding vowels that is normally reported in the literature and that is linked to the perceptual enhancement of gemination and the syllabic structure of medial geminates. Instead, the intrinsic length of medial consonants was the main driver of preceding vowel length. In terms of manner of articulation, fricatives were the longest consonants and liquids the shortest, but the ratio of singleton to geminate was highest for liquids, which may compensate for the lack of phonetic length and help maintain the salience of the geminate contrast for this category of sounds. There were no differences between males and females in the realisation of contrastive length in consonants and vowels; their durational patterns were on the whole very similar apart from slight differences in singleton to geminate ratios and final syllable lengthening, which was more evident in males then females.

The phonetic realisation of the geminate contrast and the temporal relationship between medial consonants and their surrounding vowels has been the subject of many cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal studies (eg Al-Tamimi, 2004; Arvaniti, 2001; Ghalib, 1984; ...

This paper investigates the production of wordinitial geminate consonants in Kelantan Malay with a focus on voiceless stops. It presents an acoustic phonetic analysis examining two acoustic parameters: closure duration and voice onset time (VOT). Evidence from a production experiment indicates that there is a clear durational contrast between word-initial voiceless geminate stops and their singleton counterparts. Closure duration is found to be the most robust acoustic correlate for the singleton-geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay, while VOT shows highly significant effects.

This study investigates whether the amplitude of release bursts is a potential cue to the word-initial singleton/geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay (KM). The voiceless stop series (/p-pp/, /t-tt/, /k-kk/) were examined in two different utterance conditions. Results show that release bursts for geminate stops were produced with significantly greater energy than those for singleton stops, suggesting greater articulatory efforts to mark gemination. Although the effects of prosodic context and stop place of articulation were noticeable, significant amplitude differences were preserved across utterance contexts. The findings support the role of spectral parameters, in particular release burst amplitude, in enhancing the short/long consonant contrast in this Malay variety.

Noko av det fyrste ein nordiskstudent som skal laera seg norrønt, merkjer seg som framandt, er at sub stantivi ikkje er inndelte etter kyn, men etter stomnar (ty. Stämme). I form laera i stan dard grammatikkane vert det stelt upp: a-stomnar, ō-stomnar, i-stomnar, u-stom nar, konso nant stomnar og so bortetter. Ikkje berre det: Det vert jamvel tala um t.d. "reine" a-stom nar i mot set nad til wa-, jaog ija-stomnar. Fyrst under dette nivået, innanfor stom nane, vert det skilt millom maskulina, feminina og nøytra, eller som studenten truleg er meir fortruleg med, han kyns-, hokyns-og inkjekynsord.

The present study compares the realization of intervocalic voiceless stops and vowels surrounded by voiceless stops in conversational Spanish and French. Our data reveal significant differences in how these segments are realized in each language. Spanish voiceless stops tend to have shorter stop closures, display incomplete closures more often, and exhibit more voicing than French voiceless stops. As for vowels, more cases of complete devoicing and greater degrees of partial de-voicing were found in French than in Spanish. Moreover, all French vowel types exhibit significantly lower F1 values than their Spanish counterparts. These findings indicate that the extent of reduction that a segment type can undergo in conversational speech can vary significantly across languages. Language differences in coarticulatory strategies and " base-of-articulation " are discussed as possible causes of our observations.

Preaspiration is a comparatively rare phonetic feature in the world's languages. In Europe it is only found in the north, and it is regarded as an areal feature. It is found in e.g. Icelandic, Faroese, Scottish Gaelic, some dialects in Norway, Sweden and England, and in almost all Sami languages. One of the main objectives of this thesis is to investigate the stop systems of three informants from the municipality of Bjerkreim (in the county of Rogaland, Norway) in many different phonological environments in order to establish the existence of systematic preaspiration here. Another main objective is to demonstrate systematic voiceless, unaspirated stops (lenes, /b, d, ɡ/ [p, t, k]) in environments like word-initially, word-medially and word-finally. Thus the distinctive feature pertains to [±aspiration], not [±voice]. In previous literature it is asserted that in the dialect of Bjerkreim there is distinctive postaspiration also word-medially and word-finally, but as will be seen in this thesis, this assertion does not hold water. The present author uses acoustic and auditory analysis in order to demonstrate preaspiration in the speech of the informants. Fieldwork has been conducted by the author himself, comprising the informants individually reciting word lists, reading the fable "The North Wind and the Sun", and conversations with the author. Based primarily on the word list recitation data, preaspiration is demonstrated in the interval between vowels and fortes (/p, t, k/) word-medially and word-finally (ˈVCV, ˈVC, ˈVːCV, ˈVːC). In addition to ordinary preaspiration, there is sometimes homorganic frication before the stop. Furthermore, at least partially voiceless liquids /r, l/ before fortes are attested. The nasals /m, n, ŋ/ before fortes and lenes are very marked and differ from previous accounts on similar dialects, the difference probably constituted by relative length, e.g. /mp/ [mpˑ] vs. /mb/ [mˑp]. Voiceless lenes are also demonstrated in all the phonological environments that are analysed, including in consonant clusters. Drawing on the acoustic analysis, a preliminary phonemic analysis is given, inspired by the phonological principles of Trubetzkoy. In addition, the articulatory phonology by Browman and Goldstein is used as a model to illustrate the stop system in the dialect of Bjerkreim. It will be seen that the present author argues for a monophonemic interpretation, offering reasons such as economy. In this analysis preaspiration is regarded as a part of the fortis stops. Also, homorganic frication before fortes is regarded as preaffrication, and considered a subtype of preaspiration in the Bjerkreim dialect.

This paper examines the occurrence of regressive voice assimilation in Swedish. Six speakers of Central Standard Swedish were recorded and the voicing conditions in stop-fricative and stop-stop clusters were analyzed. The findings indicate that regressive devoicing of lenis stops (/b d g/) occurs only when followed by /t/, but not /s/. This contra-dicts claims in the literature regarding the nature of regressive voice assimilation in Swedish. These findings also demonstrate the necessity of doing detailed acoustic analysis of stop production in order to ascertain the details of the phonological distribution of stop variants.

Our study deals with the durational structure of Italian words with a medial geminate or singleton consonant (e.g., palla "ball" vs. pala "shovel"). Specifically, we investigated the duration of the word-initial consonant (e.g., [p]) and found that the onset consonant was longer in geminate than in singleton words. A comparison to German word pairs with a vowel length contrast in the first syllable (e.g., bitten "please" vs. bieten "bed") showed no such duration increase for the word-initial consonant [b]. On the basis of previous studies on long-distance anticipatory effects, we argue that the strength of the geminate articulation in Italian is already foreshadowed in the word-initial consonant, whereas the German vowel length contrast does not lead to such anticipatory duration differences. Our results hence provide evidence for a distinction between consonantal and vocalic subsystems for a different set of data.

Glottalization of coda /t, p/ is a common process in American English. This study uses acoustic measures to determine when coda glottalization occurs in the conversational speech of the Buckeye Corpus. Vowels preceding coda /t, p/ tokens for 40 speakers were analyzed using H1*–H2*, an acoustic correlate of glottal constriction. Results indicate that coda glottalization is more common before a sonorant, and this effect is still found phrase-finally, even when phrasal creak is taken into account. Nonetheless, the process occurs in other environments. While we conclude that coda glottalization may occur to enhance the voicelessness of coda /t/ before sonorants (Pierrehumbert 1995, Stevens & Keyser 1989), we argue that this cannot fully explain the phenomenon.

The purpose of this study is to examine the phonetic interpretation of geminate contrast and the articulatory differences between the lexical and post-lexical geminates in Persian. In terms of two geminate types, the findings indicated that wordboundary geminates display the same temporal values as lexical geminates, however, unlike lexical geminate consonants, the phonetic implementation of adjacent identical consonants in word-boundary geminates are not allocated the feature [+tense]. Such phonologically difference affected the vowels preceding the two geminate types. Results from analyzing the qualitatively short and long vowels preceding the word-boundary geminates showed separate distributions for consonant sequences affected by different vowel types in which the tenseness of the vowel // and the duration of consonant sequences would result in considerable interaction. Contrary to RMS amplitude, formant frequencies as a robust secondary cue, could contribute to the perception of the vowel and consonant discrimination in two types of geminates in Persian. These results demonstrate that temporal compensation is maintained with the interaction between the preceding vowels and consonants in two geminate types. Duration as a primary correlate would be enhanced by Formant Frequency values as an additional acoustic correlate and increases the perceptual distance between the phonemic categories.

Khattab@ncl.ac.uk ; Jalal.Al-Tamimi@ncl.ac.uk This paper reports on phonetic and phonological patterns of gemination in Lebanese Arabic (LA) and on the temporal relationship between geminate consonants and vowel length. Six males and six females from Beirut were recorded reading target word-lists containing disyllables with medial singleton and geminate consonants preceded by long and short vowels. Acoustic and auditory analyses of medial consonants and of preceding and following vowels were conducted. Results show separate durational distributions for singleton and geminate consonants and for short and long vowels in word-list style. There was no evidence for the temporal compensation between medial consonants and preceding vowels that is normally reported in the literature and that is linked to the perceptual enhancement of gemination and the syllabic structure of medial geminates. Instead, the intrinsic length of medial consonants was the main driver of preceding vowel length. In terms of manner of articulation, fricatives were the longest consonants and liquids the shortest, but the ratio of singleton to geminate was highest for liquids, which may compensate for the lack of phonetic length and help maintain the salience of the geminate contrast for this category of sounds. There were no differences between males and females in the realisation of contrastive length in consonants and vowels; their durational patterns were on the whole very similar apart from slight differences in singleton to geminate ratios and final syllable lengthening, which was more evident in males then females.

This paper presents the first acoustic phonetic analysis of initial geminate consonants in Kelantan Malay with a focus on their durational properties. Results of a production experiment show that there is a clear durational contrast between initial geminate consonants and their singleton counterparts. The durational ratios of each singleton-geminate contrast are more than double despite the differences in duration values across different manners of articulation. Closure duration is found to be a significant acoustic correlate for the singleton-geminate contrast in Kelantan Malay. The effects of gender and vowel height are also tested.