The production of trills requires precise articulatory and aerodynamic settings, which appear to be hardly compatible with secondary palatalization – the raising and fronting of the tongue body. Yet, the precise reasons for this incompatibility are still poorly understood, largely given the paucity of articulatory work on trills. Moreover, previous investigations of palatalized trills have been...

This study investigates the degree to which African Americans participate in the sound changes currently in progress in the dialect of Charleston, South Carolina. It is based on a sample of 60 African Americans native to the area, recorded during sociolinguistic interviews; spontaneous speech is supplemented with word list reading and minimal-pair tests. The speech of 20 of the informants has b...

Vowel perception ability for 16 prelingually deafened children using Nucleus 22-channel cochlear implants was studied at 12, 24, and 36 months postimplantation. Information transmission analysis was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the implants in conveying the essential cues required for accurate vowel identification and whether the cues used varied with experience or device use. Individu...

O. Abstract 1 This paper will explore and discuss the less obvious ways syntactic structure is used to convey information and how this information could be used by a natural language database system as a heuristic to organize and search a discourse space. The primary concern of this paper will be to present a general theory of processing which capitalizes on the information provided by such non...

Palatalisation of the velars ⁄k, g ⁄ in Gallo-Romance applied not just before the usual front vowels ⁄ i, e, e ⁄ but also, famously, before the low vowel ⁄a ⁄ . Various scenarios have been proposed regarding the phonetic realisation of ⁄a ⁄ and its relation to palatalisation. I argue that ⁄a ⁄ was allophonically fronted to [æ] in stressed open syllables, where the vowel eventually merged with ⁄...