Interaction of phonetics, phonology, and sociophonology - illustrated by the vowels of standard Austrian German

Production of vowel contrasts in Northern Standard German and Austrian Standard German

The inventory of 15 German full vowels realized by speakers of Northern Standard German (NSG) and Austrian Standard German (ASG) is investigated acoustically. The vowels were produced in phonotactically regular nonsense words (bVp and dVt environments) embedded in a sentence frame. The analyses revealed that the main difference between both varieties can be found in a different acoustic realiza...

The Phonology and Phonetics of Unac- centable Vowels in Kyungsang Korean

Phonetics and Phonology of Transparent Vowels in Hungarian

1. Introduction Vowel harmony is a requirement by which vowels in a certain domain agree in one or more phonetic features. 1 In Hungarian, the feature subject to harmony is the horizontal position of the tongue ([±back]). In many Hungarian roots, vowels in a word are either all front or all back, as in öröm 'joy', város 'city' (umlaut denotes front round vowels, and acute accent denotes length)...

Loanword Adaptation and Phonological Theory

This paper examines English-based loanwords in Standard Mandarin in light of various proposals on how loanwords are adapted and processed, and discusses the implications of the findings in loanword adaptation for phonological theory. There have been three major approaches to the adaptation and processing of sound-based loanwords: the Perception Approach, the Phonology Approach, and the Percepti...

Consonant cluster production in Japanese learners of English

Japanese speakers often face difficulty in producing complex syllable onsets in English and insert an extra vowel. We examined whether the vowel inserted by Japanese speakers was epenthetic (phonological) or excrescent (phonetic). The acoustic data suggested that an L1 phonological process was involved in vowel insertion by Japanese speakers with lower-level English competency, because the inse...