Shows that vowel duration is a cue to voicing of syllable-final consonants. Notes that the effective duration of a vowel apparently extends over all parts of the acoustic signal, including the transitions reflecting the consequences of the coarticulation of vowel and consonant. (Author/RL)

Examines previously published experimental work on rhythm of spoken Spanish to establish whether or not Spanish is a "syllable-timed" language. Analyzes figures from the experiments and concludes that Spanish is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, displaying an antirhythmic pattern where each segment has a "standard duration" dependent on its…

The aim of the investigation is to compare voice and speech quality in alaryngeal patients using esophageal speech (ESOP, eight subjects), electroacoustical speech aid (EACA, six subjects) and tracheoesophageal voice prosthesis (TEVP, three subjects). The subjects reading a short story were recorded in the sound-proof booth and the speech samples…

Images of tongue/palate contact for the nasal phoneme /n/ were created using the electropalatograph (EPG). Seven typical Australian adults with no history of hearing or communication difficulty produced syllables containing /n/ paired with five vowels. The majority of productions were symmetrical had contact with the alveolar ridge, and lateral…

Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced.…

Nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have been shown to minimize cultural biases in language assessment. In the current study, we further examined the clinical utility of NWR with 83 children who lived in the rural south of the US; 33 were African American and 50 were White, with 16 classified as specifically language impaired (SLI) 6-year-olds and 67…

Research supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. (DD)

Research supported by the Joint Speech Research Unit. (DD)

Thirty children (aged 4-10) and 10 adults repeated 2 target syllables, which were analyzed acoustically to evaluate development of identification and discrimination in children for the vowel duration cue to final consonant voicing. Results showed that category boundary, category separation, response consistency, and perceptual consistency…

In three experiments we explored task-specific effects of syllable-frequency, following Perea and Carreiras' (1998) findings of a facilitative effect during naming and an inhibitory effect during lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency on articulation duration suggested a process-specific effect during…

This paper argues that Mandarin Chinese has a fixed syllabic represented by the template CGVX, with one slot in the onset and three slots in the rimeprime (as projection of the rime). It claims that the pre-nucleus glide is obligatory, is an independent constituent, and is adjoined to the rime constituent. Extensive evidence for this template is…

Adapted from the author's M.A. thesis, University of Queensland, 1971; slightly revised version of a paper presented at the 1973 Conference of the Linguistic Society of Australia. (DD)