An increasingly wide variety of imaging and tracking technologies have been applied to measuring speech articulation in recent years. However, virtually all of these techniques have been restricted to laboratory or clinical settings. Portable ultrasound technology offers a way to conduct easy, non-invasive dynamic imaging of the whole tongue for less commonly studied languages, both in the field and in the laboratory.

This paper describes the phonetic characteristics of an unexploded palatal implosive in Hendo, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This sound is an allophone of a palatal affricate implosive. Consideration of acoustic, aerodynamic and articulatory data obtained from various methods give a precise description of this sound.

In Spanish, /b, d, [vvplosive]/ are usually spirantized to voiced approximants in all syllabic contexts after a continuant sound. However, in North-Central Peninsular Spanish (NCS), spirantization interacts with coda devoicing, yielding voiceless fricatives. In the majority of cases, coda /b, d, [vvplosive]/ occur in stressed syllables. This work examines whether or not stress is a factor in the likelihood of frication and devoicing of coda /b, d, [vvplosive]/ in this dialect. An acoustic study was conducted of nine native speakers from NCS. These speakers were tested on nonce words with /b, d, [vvplosive]/ in coda position in both stressed and unstressed syllables. Measurements were made of vowel and consonant duration, presence and absence of frication and voicing, and voicing duration. The results show that frication is more likely in stressed syllables than in unstressed syllables. This suggests that in stressed syllables, a higher subglottal pressure produces higher airflow across the glottis, thereby favoring frication. In turn, frication inhibits voicing due to conflicting aerodynamic requirements between the two. We conclude that stress is a factor in spirantization and that it may indirectly affect the voicing properties of /b, d, [vvplosive]/.

The intonational typology of two Northern Australian languages, Dalabon and the Kundedjnjenghmi dialect of Bininj Gun-wok, suggests that these languages can be analyzed within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonation as having two kinds of intonational events that serve to demarcate the boundaries of intonational phrases: pitch accents and boundary tones. Both languages have also previously been described as having lexical stress. In this study, the acoustic correlates of syllables associated with intonational pitch accents, were measured, namely, F0, duration, RMS amplitude and vowel quality, in one lengthy narrative text from each language. The duration of intonational phrase-final syllables was also measured. Results indicate that syllables associated with pitch accents are phonetically lengthened and have marginally higher RMS amplitude. However, there is little variation in vowel quality due to the presence of a pitch accent or intonational prominence. Final syllables are also lengthened at intonational phrase edges, indicating that duration is a cue to this level of prosodic constituency in these languages.

Informal observation of Belfast speakers finds a larger number of falls in careful speaking styles than the literature would suggest is the case, since Belfast English is reported to be one of the minority varieties of English in which the rise predominates in both interrogatives and declaratives. Three different speaking styles, ranging from careful to spontaneous are elicited from twelve seventeen-year-old Belfast speakers, and the nuclear accents analysed. In the majority of speakers, there is a tendency to use more falling nuclei when the speech style is careful, and fewer or none at all in the most informal style. It is suggested that this is an attempt, in formal contexts, to emulate the prestige variety of the language, which is probably that spoken in Southern England, and uses a preponderance of falling nuclei. Female speakers show more willingness than males to use the features of the prestige variety, which may be explained by social, cultural and complex contextual reasons.

Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their co-articulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interlanguage variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

Results of an acoustic study of root-initial /t th t'/ for eleven speakers of Witsuwit'en (Athabaskan) are presented. Values averaged across speaker means suggest that Witsuwit'en ejectives have a brief period of creaky voice and slow rise time at vowel onset relative to the voiceless unaspirated stops. However, there is considerable inter-speaker variation in VOT and f0 perturbation, with negligible correlation between these measures, contrary to the predictions of the ejective typologies proposed by Lindau (1984) and Kingston (1985). Results of a perception study indicate that the ejective-voiceless unaspirated contrast is more difficult than the other laryngeal contrasts even for native listeners. Implications of the Witsuwit'en data for the categorization of ejectives are discussed.

Words in fluent speech frequently differ from their citation forms. This paper investigates some factors influencing the realization of the preposition for and the number four. Realizations of these words in read and spontaneous speech show that instead of viewing function words as having discrete weak, strong, or even intermediate allomorphs, a continuum resulting from gestural interaction better represents the facts. In the speech examined here, numerous factors influence different aspects of the realization of for and four. The duration of the onset /f/ is affected by the preceding prosodic boundary while the duration and composition of the rime is affected by foot structure and segmental content. The preposition exhibits extreme reduction possibilities not seen in the number. In even this small set of studies, the read and spontaneous speech highlight different generalizations, pointing out the need to examine both kinds of speech. While this paper cannot locate all factors responsible for the variation in these words, it begins to unravel some of them and their effects on different portions of function words.

This study compares two diphthongs ([ea], [oa]) and two glide-vowel sequences ([ja], [wa]) in Romanian. The diphthongs and the sequences are auditorily very similar, but they differ in their phonological patterning. An integrated production and perception experiment is conducted in search of perceptual and acoustic evidence for the different phonological representations proposed for the diphthongs and the sequences. Four acoustic parameters of the diphthongs and sequences are measured and compared in a production study. In addition, a perception experiment tests native speakers' ability to correctly identify the two types of vocalic sequences. The results support the different representations proposed for [ea] vs. [ja], but not necessarily for [oa] vs. [wa]. This asymmetry is interpreted in the context of language-specific frequency differences, and of contrast maintenance. The study shows that detailed phonetic description is needed for a complete understanding of the phonological facts.

This issue of the Journal contains further contributions to the series ‘Illustrations of the IPA’. As in the case of previous contributions, the recordings accompanying them are available at http://web.uvic.ca/ling/ipa/handbook/. Illustrations published in the Journal prior to 1998 appear in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999). Later contributions will be incorporated into future editions of the Handbook.

Kéo is an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 40,000 speakers in central Flores in eastern Indonesia. Hitherto, Kéo has been linguistically undescribed. The data for this article comes from linguistic fieldwork undertaken by the author with native Kéo speakers on the islands of Flores and Bali in Indonesia, and in Canberra, Australia. Other, written sources include (Baird 2001) and (Baird 2002). Kéo has been said to belong to the Ende-Lio languages of the Bima-Sumba subgroup of the Central Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family (B. Grimes 1988, C. Grimes et al. 1997). The Central/Eastern Malayo-Polynesian grouping has been proposed by Blust, but this is not strongly supported by the comparative method. Likewise, there is very little evidence to support the notion of a Bima-Sumba subgroup at this stage. Much more linguistic work needs to be undertaken in the region before precise genetic relationships can be established.

Ega is an endangered language spoken in the south-central region of Côte d'Ivoire, in Divo Department. The precise number of speakers is not known at present; the 14th Ethnologue (Grimes 2000) reports 291 to 3,000, and notes that ‘the ethnic group is growing, but they are shifting to the Dida language because of intermarriage and other influences’. Our own preliminary and impressionistic work suggests the number of Ega speakers to be closer to the upper end of this range, perhaps around 2,000, but we note that Ega now serves a decreasing number of sociolinguistic functions, to the extent that in at least some villages Dida has replaced Ega as the primary language of daily use. It is also clear that the degree of intergenerational transmission is low in many, if not all, Ega villages.