On the interaction of velar fronting and labial harmony.

Anticipatory Coarticulation of Labialized Velars as a Precursor to Sound Change

Phonetic evidence is presented to contribute to a possible explanation of how historical coronalization of labialized velars in front vowel environments may take place. Sound changes of labialized velar /kw/ to coronal /t/ before front vowels /i, e/ are reconstructed for the development of Greek from Indo-European. Philological accounts tend to propose progressive fronting/palatalization preced...

Velar Fronting Revisited

VOT in the babbling of French- and English-learning infants

Different languages use voice onset time (VOT) in different ways to signal the voicing contrast, for example, short lag/long lag (English) vs. prevoiced/short lag (French). Also, VOT depends on place of articulation, with labial VOTs being shorter than velar and alveolar and, sometimes, alveolar being shorter than velar. Here we examine the VOT in babbled utterances of five French-learning and ...

British English [kw], [k], and [w] distinction in back round vowel contexts

Corpus data from the Audio British National Corpus was used to compare the acoustics of British English stops with velar and/or labial articulation in onset positions preceding back rounded vowels. The acoustics of labialized velar stops in British English have not commonly been described due to their frequent phonological analysis as clusters. Labialized velars have been characterized cross-li...

Correlation between consonantal VC transitions and degree of perceptual confusion of place contrast in hindi

A previous study of the VC transitions characteristic of the five places of articulation in Hindi stops (labial, dental, retroflex, palatal, and velar) showed considerable overlap between different places correlated with the quality of the preceding vowel. For example, [labial] and [dental] had similar transitions following /i/; [labial] and [velar], following /u/; and [dental] and [palatal] fo...