Palatal Quality and Vocalic Length in Indo-European

Indo-European Loanwords in Altaic

Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology

One element of the recent controversy over historical methodology set o by Greenberg (1987)'s classi cation of American Indian languages has been his reliance on super cial lexical resemblances, with no attempt to establish phonological correspondences and no evidence from submerged morphology. Proponents of this methodology argue (Greenberg 1949, 1987, 1990, 1991 Ruhlen 1987) that this is the ...

Alignment Across Oriental and Indo-European Languages

The linguistic characteristics of Oriental languages and Indo-European languages are very different. Using purely length-based algorithm could not produce high performance on aligning texts. This paper investigates the effectiveness of critical part-of-speech (POS) criterion on alignment under conditions of different search strategies and different register texts. Two metrics, recall and precis...

Incomplete neutralization of a vocalic length contrast in Japanese*

There has been a large body of the literature on incomplete neutralization, patterns where phonologically “neutralized” segments show subtle phonetic differences. The current experiment adds a new case of incomplete neutralization to this growing body of literature. Following Mori (2002), the experiment shows that the vowels of monomoraic nouns in Japanese are lengthened when they appear in iso...

Acoustical characterization of vocalic fillers in European Portuguese

This study attempts to acoustically characterize the most common filled pause vocalizations (or vocalic fillers) in spontaneous speech in European Portuguese: the near-open central vowel [å] and the mid-central vowel [ə]. For this purpose we analyzed the spectral information of the vocalic fillers by estimating their first two formant frequencies as well as their duration properties. The vocali...