This paper is intended to provide a general orientation regarding the articulatory phonetics of the languages involved in the SAM project, as described in Wells (1987): it comprises a brief statement of the phonemic system of each language (the consonants and vowels, and how they are transcribed), together with notes on the most salient realizational and suprasegmental characteristics. As in Wells (1987), the objective is to assign a computer-coded phonemic notation, referred to as SAM-PA, using only the printable symbols from the 7-bit ASCII series.

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 paper reports results of a quantitative phonetic study of Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language that is of typological interest from a phonetic standpoint. A number of cross-linguistically rare properties are examined. These features include the phonetic realization of Kabardian's small vowel inventory, which contains only three contrastive vowel qualities (two short vowels and one long vowel), spectral characteristics of the ten supralaryngeal voiceless fricatives of Kabardian, as well as the acoustic, palatographic, and aerodynamic characteristics of ejective fricatives, an extremely rare type of segment cross-linguistically. In addition, basic properties of the consonant stop series are explored, including closure duration and voice onset time, in order to test postulated universals linking these properties to place of articulation and laryngeal setting.

In experimental phonetic research, we often come across cases of multiple perceptual cues to a phonemic distinction, even though this distinction may be seen traditionally as dependent on some single phonetic feature. The question arises as to the relative power of these cues. How equally do they share the burden of communicative relevance? For example, among the several cues that emanate from the timing of the valvular action of the larynx (Lisker and Abramson (1965); Abramson (1977)), fundamental-frequency perturbations (House and Fairbanks (1953)) have been shown by some studies, apparently starting with Haggard, Ambler and Callow (1970) and Fujimura (1971), to help in the perceptual differentiation of voiced and voiceless stop consonants; however, recent work (Abramson and Lisker (1985)) suggests that this cue has very limited efficacy compared with other acoustic consequences of voice timing.

This paper describes changes to the extIPA (Extensions to the IPA) symbol set, the motivation for these changes, and areas where future changes by the IPA might be helpful to clinical transcribers. The extIPA symbol set was introduced some twenty-five years ago. Since that time, some minor changes have been introduced to the extIPA chart but no major rearrangement has been attempted. The 2010 Oslo meeting of ICPLA (International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association) started a revision of the extIPA chart, and this process was recently completed. A revised extIPA chart was approved at the 2016 ICPLA meeting. The revision involved the addition, modification and removal of categories and symbols. All changes derive from the need to denote sounds encountered in disordered speech that were not covered by the original chart.

This study focuses on the temporal analysis of stops /p b t d k ɡ/ and devoicing analysis of voiced stops /b d ɡ/ produced in different word positions by six native speakers of European Portuguese. The study explores acoustic properties related to voicing. The following acoustic properties were measured: voice onset time (VOT), stop duration, closure duration, release duration, voicing into closure duration, duration of the preceding vowel and duration of the following vowel. Results suggested that when [b d ɡ] were devoiced, the acoustic properties stop duration, closure duration, duration of the following vowel, duration of the preceding vowel and duration of voicing into closure were relevant for the voicing distinction. Implications for research and practice in speech and language therapy are discussed. Further investigation is needed to find how the productions analysed in the present study were perceived by listeners, specifically productions of devoiced stops.

Maastricht (Mosae Trajectum in Roman times) is the capital of the Dutch province of Limburg and one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands. Situated in the extreme south, close to the Belgian border, the city is fairly small, with a population of just over 120,000. Maastricht enjoys a world-wide reputation as the place where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The dialect of Maastricht belongs to the south-eastern dialect group (Weijnen 1966: §§ 166, 173), which shares a number of properties with dialects in Belgium and Germany. A more recent classification (Belemans, Kruijsen & van Keymeulen 1998) assigns the dialect to Central Limburgian, which comprises seven subgroups in the Netherlands and Belgium, more particularly to Trichterlands. Two earlier descriptions are Houben (1905), which is historically oriented, and van Buuren (1991).

Luxembourgish (local language name: Lëtzebuergesch [ˈlətsəbuəjəʃ], French name: Luxembourgeois, German name: Luxemburgisch) is a small West-Germanic language mainly spoken in the multilingual speech community of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where it is one of the three official languages alongside German and French. Being the first language of most Luxembourgers it also has the status of the national language (since 1984). Although in its origin Luxembourgish has to be considered as a Central Franconian dialect, it is nowadays regarded by the speech community as a language of its own. As a consequence, German is considered a different language. An official orthographical system has been devised. Luxembourgish is used very frequently in day-to-day oral communication at all social levels; it is very common on local radio and television; it is the only language spoken in parliament sessions and it is also very often used at the workplace. Although the vocabulary of Luxembourgish has a substantial number of loan words from French and German, the morpho-syntax follows Germanic patterns. Luxembourgish today has approximately 400,000 speakers, including many L2 speakers (around 43% of the population does not have the Luxembourgish nationality).

In Guinaang Bontok, there is a phonological contrast between singletons and geminates in all consonants (/p t k ? b d g m n ŋ l s w j/) (Reid 1963, 1973; Thurgood 1997). All phonological geminates except for the oral voiced stop geminates are phonetically long consonants (Reid 1963), allowing a phonological distinction which is primarily based on phonetic duration for nasals, fricatives, liquids, glides and voiceless stops. In a cross-linguistic examination of geminates (Thurgood 1993), there were more languages listed as examples for having stop and nasal geminates than for glide geminates, and it was suggested that alveolar was the cross-linguistically preferred place of articulation for geminate consonants. In this study, it was hypothesized that the cross-linguistically less common length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides, were phonetically less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop and nasal consonants. Similarly, it was hypothesized that contrasts in the cross-linguistically common place of articulation (i.e. alveolar) is phonetically clearer than less common contrasts (e.g. velar). In order to test these hypotheses, duration measurements were conducted on single and geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok. The average durational contrast between short and long glides was smaller than the contrast in stop and nasal consonants. The hypothesis was therefore partially supported.

This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase of /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/. Furthermore, we unexpectedly found that the friction phase of /tj/ is significantly longer than that of /di/. An additional finding not related to the topic of the present study was that the Polish voiceless stops of the four speakers tested showed aspiration, in contrast to phonetic descriptions of these sounds as unaspirated.

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.

Gayo is an Austronesian language spoken by some 260,000 people in the central highlands of the Indonesian province of Aceh, at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. Gayo belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages (Ross 1995, Blust 1999). Nothofer (1994) places Gayo along with Nias, Mentawai, Enggano and the various Batak languages in a North-West Sumatra/Barrier Islands subgroup. Five distinct but mutually intelligible dialects are recognised within Gayo: Bukit, Dëret, Cik, Serbejadi and Lues.

Berber (or Tamazight) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by an estimated 15–25 million in North Africa. It is mainly spoken in Morocco, Algeria, and by the Touareg population in Niger and Mali. Berber is also a native language of populations living in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, though their numbers are less significant. Large Berber communities also live in Diasporas mainly in France, Spain, Holland, and Belgium. Three varieties of Berber are spoken in Morocco: Tarifit, spoken in northern Morocco, Tamazight, spoken in the Middle-Atlas, and Tashlhiyt, spoken in southern Morocco. Tashlhiyt, the variety presented here, is sufficiently homogeneous for all native speakers, who number an estimated 7–9 million, to communicate without difficulties (Stroomer 2008). There is nonetheless a measure of sub-dialectal variation, which affects mainly the way some stop consonants are produced. Three subsystems, corresponding roughly to three distinct geographical locations, can be identified: the ‘occlusive’ subsystem spoken in Agadir and its suburbs, the ‘fricative’ subsystem spoken mainly in the High-Atlas area, which spirantizes noncoronal obstruents /bkg/ in some contexts, and the ‘sibilant’ subsystem spoken in the Anti-Atlas area, where /t/ and /d/ are realized in some contexts as [s] and [z], respectively (Boukous 1994). This study is based on the speech of Tashlhiyt speakers who originate from Agadir. The text of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ was read by a 27-year-old female speaker.

This study investigates articulatory characteristics of /s, z, ∫, t∫, d[zcy ]/ in disyllabic nonsense words of the form [biCib], [buCub] and [baCab], where C represents the consonants listed above. The words were produced in a carrier sentence. Using the technique of electropalatography, quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from a speaker of Hindi. The results showed that the area of tongue-palate contact was significantly greater for the voiced fricative [z] than for the voiceless fricative [s]. In affricates, however, the contact area was significantly greater for the stop part of the voiceless affricate [t∫] than for the stop part of the voiced affricate [d[zcy ]]. On the other hand, the area of contact for the fricative part of [t∫] and [d[zcy ]] and the fricative [∫] was about the same. The area of contact for [s] and [z] was also significantly greater than for [∫] and the fricative part of [t∫] and [d[zcy ]]. The place of articulation for [∫] was significantly more posterior than for [s] and [z]. The place of articulation for the stop and fricative parts of [t∫] and [d[zcy ]] partly overlapped, but did not coincide. The width of the groove for [∫] and the fricative part of [t∫] and [d[zcy ]] was significantly greater than for [s] and [z]; however, the length of the groove for these segments was about the same. Numerical and electropalatographic data are presented and discussed in the light of the published numerical, palatographic and/or x-ray data on the fricatives and affricates. Coarticulatory effects of vocalic context on articulatory parameters of the investigated consonants are also discussed.

This paper provides a statistical account of schwa elision and vowel nasalization, and of nasalization and deletion of plosives in a large corpus of German spontaneous dialogues in comparison with an equally large data base of read speech (sentences and texts) from large groups of North German speakers. The phonetic variability of these phrase-level processes is projected onto the articulatory dynamics in global opening and closing gestures, which are taken to be basic phonetic structures of speech communication. Trends for gesture reorganization are derived from statistics, and related to external control factors of word boundary, word class, speech style as well as internal phonetic conditions of gestural make-up and of reduction of articulatory complexity. These synchronic facts of one language are compared with parallel instances from other languages and linked to congruent diachronic data of sound change, thus laying the foundation for generalizable phrase-level patterns of human speech production.

Many languages in South East Asia have voiceless nasal consonants that contrast with their voiced counterparts. What has not been reported previously is that there are two distinct types of voiceless nasals. We will begin by considering the more well-known type, found in languages such as Burmese. These voiceless nasals are usually said to have an open glottis for most of the articulation, but some voicing for the period just before the stricture is broken (Ladefoged 1971: 11). In this view they have two parts. The first is necessary to distinguish them from their voiced counterparts. The second distinguishes one voiceless nasal from another, by making the place of articulation more apparent; the voiced offglide from the nasal into the vowel has formant transitions that are characteristic of each place of articulation. Dantsuji has shown that, in addition, the voiced portion of the voiceless nasals in Burmese “includes significant cues which can distinguish points of articulation” (Dantsuji 1986: 10). Despite the small voiced portion, in most phonological treatments of these sounds, a voiceless nasal consonant is considered not as a sequence of two items, a voiceless segment followed by a voiced segment, but as a single voiceless unit with a low level phonetic rule inserting the voicing towards the end. Burmese is a textbook example, with forms as shown in Table 1 (from Maddieson 1984; also in Ladefoged 1993: 282).

The development of Standard Austrian German (SAG; de-AT) is closely linked to the development of Standard German German (SGG; de-DE) as spoken in Northern Germany. Traditionally, SAG is strongly geared towards SGG norms. The orientation towards SGG norms goes back to at least 1750, when Maria Theresia ordered the adoption of the Upper Saxonian norms in place at that time (Ebner 1969, Wiesinger 1989). Since then, SAG pronunciation is modelled on SGG and Austrian newsreaders are instructed according to the norms of Duden's (2005) Aussprachewörterbuch and Siebs (1958, with an addendum for Austria) (Wächter-Kollpacher 1995, Soukup & Moosmüller 2011). This procedure leads to an inconsistent usage of SGG features in Austrian broadcasting media (Wiesinger 2009, Soukup & Moosmüller 2011, Hildenbrandt & Moosmüller 2015). Therefore, from a methodological point of view, pronunciation used in the Austrian broadcasting media is unsuitable for defining SAG (Moosmüller 2015).

This paper reports results of an acoustic study of stress in the Turkish dialect of the Northwest Caucasian language, Kabardian. Stressed syllables were found to have consistently higher fundamental frequency and characteristically greater duration and intensity than unstressed syllables. No evidence was found for secondary stresses. Schwa and, to a lesser extent, /ɐ/ were shown to undergo slight raising as their duration in unstressed syllables decreased. This gradient raising is likely due to coarticulatory overlap with adjacent consonants rather than a categorical shift in vowel quality. Considerations of articulatory effort rather than perceptual dispersion predict both the categorical alternation between stressed /aː/ and unstressed /ɐ/ in Kabardian and the non-categorical raising of schwa and /ɐ/ in unstressed syllables.

The category of approximant sounds has been defined and redefined by leading phoneticians and recognized by the International Phonetic Association; nonetheless, within this class of sounds, semivowels, rhotic sonorants and other approximants such as [] are not clearly differentiated. In a recently-published study, Martínez-Celdrán (2004) proposes a new definition which considers approximants as a category composed of several subclasses of sounds. In this paper, an acoustic analysis of the approximants [] in Galician is presented. We will show that open and closed approximants, stops and fricatives present statistically significant differences both in duration and intensity, demonstrating the pertinence of the categorization postulated by Martínez-Celdrán.