This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compared to the most prestigious local accents, viz. those of Florence, Milan and Rome. Historically based on the Florentine pronunciation, and traditionally identified with it, Standard Italian is nowadays used by trained speakers such as stage actors and (but less and less so) radio and TV speakers. The present paper aims at depicting the most salient features of Standard Italian, still a matter of primary reference in language courses, comparing them with the characteristic features of the three most prominent local varieties, with which the foreign learner is most likely to be confronted. All traditional (and sometimes widely debated) issues of Italian phonetics/phonology are addressed in the most ecumenical setting possible.

Electropalatographic and acoustic data reported in this study show differences in closure location and degree, dorsopalatal contact size, closure duration, relative timing of events and formant frequency between clear /l/ and dark /l/ in two dialects of Catalan (Valencian and Majorcan). The two Catalan dialects under investigation differ also regarding degree of darkness but essentially not regarding coarticulatory resistance at the word edges, i.e. the alveolar lateral is equally dark word-initially and word-finally in Majorcan, and clearer in the former position vs. than the latter in Valencian, and more resistant to vowel effects in the two positions than intervocalically in both dialects. With reference to data from the literature, it appears that languages and dialects may differ as to whether /l/ is dark or clear in all word positions or whether or not initial /l/ is clearer than final /l/, and that articulatory strengthening occurs not only word- and utterance-initially but word- and utterance-finally as well. These and other considerations confirm the hypothesis that degree of darkness in /l/ proceeds gradually rather than categorically from one language to another.

This paper presents findings on the articulatory and prosodic conditioning of Italian (lexical and post-lexical) geminate and non-geminate consonants. Phonetic and phonological prominence interact, resulting in a durational contrast which is not uniformly robust. So-called ‘inherent’ geminates are also found to be long post-consonantally, contrary to received wisdom, and do not form ‘supergeminates’ in conditions of postlexical gemination. Formant analysis of laterals reveals possible non-durational properties of gemination, with evidence for a more palatalised tongue configuration in geminates. Implications for the structural status of gemination are discussed.

In a study of European Portuguese fricatives it was noted that /R, / were often realized as [χ, ], which are, respectively, unvoiced and voiced uvular fricative, and voiceless tapped alveolar fricative. Although these phones have not previously been recognized as occurring in European Portuguese, they occurred in 115 words out of a corpus of 1304 words, out of which 107 words could be analysed, in recordings made by four native speakers (two men, two women). Time- and frequency-averaged power spectral characteristics are presented, together with a detailed temporal analysis. The frequencies of high-amplitude peaks in the [χ] and [] spectra clearly indicate a back place of articulation, with median duration across subjects and words of 69 ms and 35 ms. The short (approximately 20 ms), noisy acoustic signal in [] suggests a stop-like manner of articulation, but the turbulence noise characteristics, similar to fricatives, differ from the transient burst noise of plosives.

Formulations of flapping as a symbolic phonological rule suggest clear articulatory differences between flaps and stops, and often offer no overt explanation for why phrase boundaries should block the alternation. The present study explores the articulatory foundation of the distinction between flaps and non-flaps in word-final position. We examine kinematic and acoustic data for these articulations in phrase-final and phrase-medial positions and in falling- and level-stress contours. It is shown that a discrepancy exists between acoustic and articulatory durational patterning – while acoustic durations of flaps are shorter than those of non-flaps overall, their articulatory durations are not uniformly so. It is important to consider multiple potential articulatory sources – both spatial and temporal – for the acoustic shortness that characterizes flaps, including spatial reduction, temporal articulatory shortening, and changes in intergestural coordination. The kinematic data indicate that different sources of word-final flap shortness exist for different speakers and different prosodic conditions, suggesting that gradient variability in the spatiotemporal patterning of tongue-tip constrictions yields acoustic shortening in word-final flaps.

This study describes the frequencies of the first two formants of monophthongs produced by male RP speakers in four age groups: aged 20–25, 35–40, 50–55, and 65–73 years in 2001. The eleven monophthongs were spoken in /hVd/ contexts by five men in each age group. The eleven words, together with nineteen filler words chosen to distract attention from the purpose of the experiment, were randomized four times and read by each speaker in citation form, for a total of 880 items. F1 and F2 frequencies were measured in Hz and ERB-rate. As expected, in younger compared with older speakers, F1 is higher in /ε/ and especially /æ/, and F2 is higher in /u:/ and /υ/. Other vowels varied in overall dispersion of F1 or F2, but no other differences between age groups were observed. There is evidence that the oldest age group to show change in a vowel's quality has particularly large differences between individuals, so that, collectively, members of that group span much of the quality range from ‘conservative’ (older groups) to ‘progressive’ (younger groups). Such so-called ‘break groups’ have implications for theoretical explanations of sound change.

We compare the vowel systems of Finnish, Mongolian (in China) and Udmurt, and illustrate the average placements of their monophthongal vowel types on F1/F2 plots. Mongolian has more vowel phonemes (12 long and 12 short ones) than Finnish (eight long and eight short) and Udmurt (seven). Some basic linguistic characteristics and key word lists of the three languages are presented. For comparison we utilise psychoacoustical F1/F2 formant charts which are fairly good approximations to the vowel space. The phoneme distances are indicated by means of circles of 1 Bark diameter centered on the mean F1/F2 points of the vowel types. This kind of representation allows one to draw conclusions about qualitative vicinity, partial overlapping or even merging of phoneme qualities on F1/F2 plots and about the necessity of further acoustic parameters for vowel differentiation. We also discuss some centralisation phenomena in the three languages.

This paper provides articulatory and acoustic data on voiceless implosive stops in Seereer-Siin, an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo family spoken in Senegal. Seereer is characterized by pairs of voiced and voiceless implosive stops in three places of articulation. These pairs are phonemically contrastive in lexical items. Oral air pressure measurements from Seereer stops uphold Clements & Osu's (2002) proposal that implosives and other non-explosive stops are characterized by the absence of positive oral air pressure rather than the presence of negative oral air pressure during occlusion. Acoustic data show that voiceless implosives are characterized by a short period of silence ranging from approximately twenty to fifty milliseconds before the onset of prevoicing prior to release. These findings replicate to a certain extent those of Faye & Dijkstra (1997).

Phonologists have long discussed the properties of ‘stress’ in Turkish, though there are some authors that suggest that Turkish is actually a pitch-accent language. As a first step in determining whether Turkish should be grouped with pitch-accent languages such as Basque and Japanese or with stress-accent languages such as English, this experimental study provides a detailed phonetic examination of word-level accent in Turkish. Seven female native speakers of Turkish were recorded saying 40 target words in three repetitions. The results show that there are significant differences in duration, peak amplitude, and peak F0 between words with final vs. non-final lexical accent. The magnitude of the duration differences, however, is not likely to be sufficiently perceptible to be a reliable cue to accent placement. The F0 peaks were dramatically different between lexically accented and unaccented syllables. A discriminant analysis confirms that F0 is the most robust cue, followed by intensity and then duration. The current study also provides a method for determining lexical accent placement in words where accent placement has been disputed. That is, a marked drop in F0 signals that the syllable preceding the drop contains the lexical accent.

A. C. Gimson was editor of Le Maître Phonétique (m.f.), which evolved into the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, for 25 years from 1950. Besides his general editorial supervision, he provided those publications with two of his own early articles, over 30 reviews and numbers of congratulatory and obituary tributes. He gradually phased out the short transcribed passages of various languages he and others had provided for learners and teachers: they had become a less significant element among IPA adherents. His encouragement of progressively more substantial contributions to the pages of the m.f. inevitably led to its 1970 major transformation, with normal orthography, into the present Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

Arop-Lokep, an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea, has a contrast between a trilled /r/ and a geminate /rr/ in both intervocalic and word-initial positions. This paper presents the results of acoustic and perceptual experiments involving these segments. Specifically, we probe the statistical characteristics of the /r/ vs. /rr/ contrast across prosodic positions from the perspective of both the speaker and the listener. We measure trills in 24 different Arop-Lokep words, so the resulting data are quite robust and give an excellent idea of the variation inherent in the language. A novel finding is that both lengths of trill consist of more apical contacts word-initially than intervocalically. The scope of this work is unprecedented in that no previous instrumental study has examined both initial and medial geminate trills in the same language.

This paper discusses techniques, including the Braille IPA, which are useful for the full inclusion of blind and visually impaired students into the phonetics classroom. Topics include transcribing, reading transcription, access to textbooks and classroom management. Suggestions for making the classroom more accessible have the added advantage of creating better access to information for the sighted students as well. The material may also be useful to blind phonetics instructors who teach sighted students.

Seri (self-designation: cmiique iitom [kwĩki:tom]) is a language isolate spoken in the state of Sonora, Mexico, by about 800 people. In this description we present a variety that is typical of the majority of speakers. The recordings are of one of the authors (XMH), a male speaker born in 1964. The technical description is based on Moser & Moser (1965), although the analysis has been updated to agree with the data and arguments presented in Marlett (1981, 1988) and Moser (1996).

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) by approximately 6 million speakers. This variety is the same as what is commonly referred to internationally as ‘Flemish’. However, the term ‘Flemish’ is avoided here since it erroneously suggests that this language is different from the one spoken in the Netherlands: the lexical and syntactic differences between the two language varieties are very small. Nevertheless, there are significant phonetic differences as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities.

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.