Examines vowel harmony in the "Gaucho dialect" of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Informants from four areas of the state were studied: the capital city (Porto Alegre), the border region with Uruguay, and two areas of the interior populated by descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants from Europe, mainly Germans and…

Examination of the perceptibility of carryover coarticulatory perturbations occurring at syllabic vowels in Mandarin Chinese suggests that, in connected speech, a portion of fundamental frequency at intertonemic onset is perturbed, including initial voiced consonants and vowels, and that the perturbations result from preservative as well as…

A study investigating the evolution in French of the unstressed "e" positioned between single consonants (e.g., "besoin") is presented. It is argued that stabilization of this pattern cannot be confirmed in the speech of educated Parisians but appears to be governed by sociolinguistic variables. Lexical conditioning is examined. (Author/MSE)

The availability of cochlear implants in younger children has provided the opportunity to evaluate the relative impact of the production system, or the sounds young children can say, and the auditory system, or the sounds children can hear, on early vocal communication. Limited access to the acoustic properties of speech results in differences in…

The aim of the study was to analyse speech perception of children with cochlear implants (N=29) and children fitted with traditional hearing aids (N=20). One- and two-syllable words were presented auditorily in a forced choice minimal-pair discrimination task. The children repeated the word and pointed to the appropriate picture presented on…

This treatise on the theoretical and historical foundations of distinctive feature theory traces the evolution of the distinctive features concept in the context of related notions current in linguistic theory, discusses the evolution of individual distinctive features, and criticizes certain acoustic and perceptual correlates attributed to these…

This paper is one of a number of studies within the conceptual framework of natural phonology, according to which phonological processes are of two kinds, context-free and context-sensitive. Context-free changes can be explained by the character of the sounds themselves; context-sensitive processes are explained largely by the function of the…

The paper discusses lexical evidence proposed by Samuel E. Martin, including later revisions thereof by R.A. Miller, concerning a genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese, based on an examination of vowel changes in Middle Korean and Old Japanese. While the author rejects Chinese phonetic evidence as inconclusive and affirms the legitimacy…

Reasons for the structural or functional classification of the Russian /y/ as an allophone of /i/ are explained in this article. Theory countering this classification, proposed by L.V. Scherba and L.R. Zinder, is also presented. Additionally, comments by Kenneth Pike support the author's criticism of the structuralist approach to the problem. (RL)

This experiment investigated the language specificity of phonetic processes. Results suggest the need for adding another language-specific level of processing to the contemporary phonology-phonetic theory. Such a phonetic competence component would define the level at which semantic intention is integrated with the functional properties of the…

Paper presented at the 1st All India Conference of Linguists, Poona, India, December 1970. (DD)

Four adults and 16 five-year-olds were asked to repeat words that differed in voicing of initial and final stop consonants and then to respond to revision requests. Children and adults decreased vowel duration and increased final closure duration in revised speech, regardless of the source of miscomprehension. (Author/JDD)

Eight preschool children who underwent tracheotomy during the prelingual period were compared to matched controls on a variety of speech measures. Children with tracheotomies showed reduced acoustic vowel space, suggesting they were limited in their ability to produce extreme vocal tract configurations for vowels postdecannulation. Oral motor…

This study investigated developmental patterns of acquisition of the unrounded U.S. English vowels, by following 6 normally developing children from 22 to 30 months of age. Three classes of production errors were identified: intertrial production variability, context-sensitive substitutions, and context-free systematic substitution patterns.…

This article attempts, through a study on the acoustic and the perceptual level of the contrast between two Dutch vocalic phonemes, to present a rigorous methodology for contrastive phonetics to be used by language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AM)