This study investigated lateral asymmetry in the linguopalatal speech sounds of British English by means of electropalatography. This instrumental technique visualizes tongue–palate contact during speech production and allows for the quantification of contact patterns. The first and main objective of the study was to establish a method of measuring asymmetry that would be more sensitive than the approach used previously and would facilitate statistical analysis. The method employed a modified index of asymmetry and controlled for the overall amount of tongue–palate contact. The secondary objective was to use the proposed method to quantify asymmetry in the production of the linguopalatal consonants of British English, focusing on asymmetry observed in the region of the palate corresponding to the place of articulation. Regression analysis of 22,004 speech sounds, produced by four native speakers, indicated that the approximant /l/ is the most asymmetrical speech sound, followed by the central approximants /j, r/. Although fricatives had been hypothesized to be highly asymmetrical, they were not consistently more asymmetrical than plosives. In terms of the place of articulation of speech sounds, velar sounds were less asymmetrical than alveolars. It was possible to account for some of these findings by referring to the unilateral productions of approximants.

This study looked at the realization of the high-level Tone 1 in Taiwan Mandarin to examine a public impression of the central dialect, which is said to have a tendency to end with a rise. Fifty-three Mandarin native speakers (27 northern and 26 central) were recruited. Half performed a reading task and half a word-guessing task on 24 disyllabic words with Tone 1 embedded. Results showed rising realizations were the most prominent for the tone, regardless of dialect, gender, genre, and syllable position, but were more prevalent among females than males, and more common and enlarged in the final than the non-final position. Dialectal differences were twofold and mainly lay in the acoustic realization. Central speakers showed both a lower pitch register and a steeper declination than their northern counterparts, and central females also demonstrated an upstep in the final position of the word-guessing task, which completely annihilated the effect of the downtrend. This implies the impressionistic tendency to end high indeed exists in the Tone 1 of the central variety, but its percept is not based on rising realizations alone. Instead, it stands out as a dialectal feature via an enlargement of the rise in the foreground against a disruption of the downward trend in the background. The female lead in the realization suggests the rising Tone 1 does not come with a negative connotation. Perceptual tolerance for the variant likely stemmed from a long-standing free variation between high-level and high-rise for the tone.

This study investigates the voice onset time (VOT) of stops in Bahdini Kurdish, which are characterized by a three-way laryngeal contrast of voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated and voiced stops. Thirty native speakers read a forty-word list three times, which included three examples of each stop in pre-vocalic onset position. Words were chosen based on specific contextual factors to account for place of articulation, laryngeal state, following vowel height, and length contrasts. The findings show that VOT distinguishes stop categories in Kurdish, with voicing lead indicating voiced stops, short lag for voiceless unaspirated stops and long lag for voiceless aspirated stops. Results of the linear mixed-effects model show that laryngeal state, place of articulation, following vowel height and length had significant effects on VOT. The gender of the participants, however, showed no significant effect on VOT. In line with most research on the effect of place of articulation on VOT, in voiceless aspirated stop categories, bilabials had the shortest VOT, followed by dentals and velars. Voiceless unaspirated bilabials had the shortest VOT values, followed by dentals, uvulars and then velars. Voiced stops do not show such a pattern. These results are compatible with other research on Indo-Iranian languages with three-way laryngeal categories.

This exploratory study investigates sibilants in Mixean Low Navarrese, an endangered variety of Basque. This variety has been described with ten different contrastive sibilants: /s̻, s̺, ʃ, t͡s̻, t͡s̺, t͡ʃ, z̻, z̺, ʒ, d͡z̺/. The objective of the paper is to (a) provide a detailed description of the acoustics of Mixean sibilants, and (b) elucidate whether ten categories can be proposed based only on acoustical data, or whether fewer categories should be considered. The study is based on free-conversation data of ten subjects (three females, seven males) aged between 80 and 85 years. We analyze metrics reflecting the place of articulation (spectral moments, and especially the center of gravity (CoG)), including also the temporal dynamics of CoG (using the discrete cosine transform of CoG measurements of nine intervals of each phone). We also explore the acoustic correlates of the contrasts between (a) voiced and voiceless sounds and (b) fricative and affricate sounds. The results show that only seven categories can be proposed based on acoustic measurements. The lamino-alveolar series reliably contrasts with the rest, but the distinction does not hold between the apico-alveolar and the postalveolar series. We found minimal differences in the analysis of dynamic data, and none in the static analysis.

Jarai is a Chamic language of Vietnam and Cambodia that is traditionally described as preserving the original Austronesian voicing contrast in onset obstruents. However, there is anecdotal evidence that it has developed a register contrast, i.e. a binary contrast based on a bundle of spectral properties like pitch, voice quality and vowel quality. We conducted production and perception experiments of the voicing/register contrast in two Jarai varieties spoken in Saom Kaning, Cambodia, and Ea Sup, Vietnam, to determine if they preserve voicing and/or have developed a register contrast. Results show that both dialects have a register contrast primarily based on vowel height modulations (F1) and that onset voicing has become at best an optional secondary property of register. F1 is also the primary cue used for register identification in both dialects. Implications for the diachronic development of the register contrast in Chamic languages and in Mainland Southeast Asia in general are discussed.

This paper reports on an acoustic study of the retroflex lateral /ɭ/ and non-retroflex lateral /l/, as well as on the schwas following the two laterals in the Zibo dialect. Analyses of formants measured at the temporal midpoint of the lateral and schwa segments show that the retroflex lateral /ɭ/ has a significantly lower F1 as well as a significantly larger C/V duration ratio than the non-retroflex lateral. No significant difference is found in F2 or F3 of the two laterals. Moreover, the schwa following /ɭ/ has a significantly lower F1 than that following /l/, which could play a robust role of cue enhancement in distinguishing the preceding laterals, resulting in an overall enhancement of an otherwise auditorily vulnerable contrast in the laterals. Some inter-speaker variation is observed in the realization of /ɭ/, especially in F3, which may be indicative of a change in progress. These results provide insights into the phonemic status of the retroflex lateral in the Zibo dialect, which are further discussed in light of phonetic and phonological explanations.

Ultrasound and center of gravity frequency data for the sequences /ʃ#s/ and /s#ʃ/ produced by Central Catalan speakers reveal that the former sequence is implemented through continuous articulatory and spectral trajectories which, depending on speaker, may be: intermediate between /ʃ/ and /s/ all throughout, thus supporting a dynamic blending mechanism; /ʃ/-like at onset and intermediate between the two fricatives at offset, which is indicative of C1-to-C2 carryover coarticulation. The sequence /s#ʃ/, on the other hand, undergoes regressive assimilation into [ʃ(ʃ)] according to the acoustic signal but less clearly so in the light of the articulatory data. This discrepancy appears to be due to the fact that, while C1=/s/ assimilates indeed to C2=/ʃ/ at constriction location, coarticulation-induced changes in tongue body configuration behind the primary articulator may occur as long as they do not jeopardize the front-cavity dependent frequency characteristics of the [ʃ] frication noise. Differences in articulatory complexity between /ʃ#s/ and /s#ʃ/ appear to result from the production mechanisms involved, i.e., tongue dorsum raising behind the /s/ constriction for /s#ʃ/ and tongue body repositioning for /ʃ#s/. In agreement with this interpretation, /ʃ#s/ but not /s#ʃ/ turned out to be longer than /s#s/ and /ʃ#ʃ/.

This paper is concerned with the velarized lateral [ɫ] as a possible realization of the lateral phoneme /l/ in the rural Central Bavarian base dialects of German in Austria. So far, velarized laterals in Austrian German have mainly been described as a socially marked realization of /l/ in Vienna. However, descriptions of Austrian dialects mostly lack detailed acoustic analyses. Therefore, we analyzed the first two formants of alveolar laterals from dialect speakers in seventeen locations around Vienna that fall into the Central and South Central Bavarian dialect areas. Recordings were taken from the ‘German in Austria’ Corpus, from four speakers per location (two old, two young, each one male, one female), with thirty-two items per speaker with laterals in word-initial and twenty-two in word-final position. We asked whether the degree of velarization as measured by the difference between F2 and F1 (the smaller the more velarized) depends on this linguistic factor of position in the word – as has been shown for other Germanic languages – or social factors including the recording location’s distance from Vienna, age and gender of the speakers. Results showed that velarization was most frequently but not exclusively found in the Eastern region closest to Vienna (Central Bavarian dialects). Non-velarized and velarized laterals tended towards a complementary distribution in initial versus final word position and male speakers showed more velarization overall. Specifically, old speakers in locations close to Vienna tended towards more velarization in word-initial position compared to other regions, matching descriptions of Viennese dialect.