This paper gives a complete account of vowel nasalization in Standard Polish. A distinction is made between obligatory and phonostylistic processes. Phonostylistic evidence may serve as a basis for making unambiguous decisions about the structure of underlying representations, intermediate phonological forms, and assimilation of borrowings to the…

Phonetic inventories of nine children (5 years old or younger) with profoundly impaired hearing who used the 22-electrode cochlear implant were monitored before implantation and during the first four years of implant use. Data suggested trends in the order of phone acquisition similar to those of normally hearing children, although the process of…

The terms "fortis" and "lenis" are variously regarded as having one single underlying phonetic correlate or many. An exploratory analysis of acoustic and aerodynamic data on contrasting stop series in a number of European and non-European languages confirms that a significant variation in peak intra-oral pressure and in articulatory stricture…

This article describes an experiment in which the following hypothesis was tested and supported: that tension serves to reinforce the phoneme's articulatory characteristic, whether it be closure or openness; and that audibility interferes with perception of tension. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The paper discusses some important distinctions between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. It is the authors' contention that the distinction between the two must be maintained in experimental linguistics, or else inadequate models result. Three experiments are described. In the first, subjects pronounce nonsense words and the…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

The reappearance of an old controversy on how best to analyze the Russian palatalized consonants prompts the author of this article to define the words "palatalization" and "palatal." Contrastive examples clarify phonetic terminology including the classifications of "labial voiced and voiceless palatalized stops,""labial voiced and voiceless…

A spectrographic investigation was carried out on the speech of normal hearing and deaf speakers; the research attempted to answer questions concerning formant transitions, coarticulation and neutralization of vowels in the speech of the deaf adults. (Author/RM)

Describes a study that examined the organization inherent in children's misarticulations of final consonant sounds. Specifically, it inquired whether, when children with final stop and fricative omissions are taught to produce either stops or fricatives in word-final positions, generalization occurs to untaught items or only to taught items.…

This article describes a technique used to monitor the action of the upper front surface of the soft palate during normal speech in French. Results tend to confirm the findings of other instrumental phonetic research, and contradict some theoretical claims of French phonology. (CLK)

Presents the results of a study of attention as a factor in children's natural and experimental acquisition of articulatory behavior. (TO)

In phonetical terminology, a consonant produced by completely closing the nasal and oral air passages (implosion), resulting in a retention of air, and then suddenly opening the closure (explosion), is known as occlusive. (DD)