Using cross-linguistic evidence from the relationship of epenthetic vowel choice to the vowel system of a given language, this paper proposes a set of context-free markedness constraints on vowel features. Universally ranked constraints yield the result that front vowels are more marked than back and that round vowels are marked; languages may vary in how they rank the markedness of low and non...

Some aerodynamic approaches to the estimation of velopharyngeal opening (VPO) are confounded by oral impedance, which varies with tongue height and affects nasal flow. Here the relationship between nasal flow and tongue height is investigated using a synchronized EMAaerodynamics system. A corpus of Hindi nasal and oral vowels is examined. Tongue height and nasal flow are weakly but positively c...

Previous studies on the acoustic properties of Greek vowels have indicated that they may have voiceless realisations in certain phonological contexts. Researchers have suggested that such devoicing is restricted to the high vowels /i/ and /u/ [7], [10]. Analysis of production data from 12 native Greek speakers suggests that devoicing is not restricted to the high vowels but that other vowels ca...

the aim of the present paper is to study the status of the short vowels /i/ and /u/ in five selected iranian balochi dialects. these dialects are spoken in sistan (si), saravan (sa), khash (kh), iranshahr (ir), and chabahar (ch) regions located in province sistan va baluchestan in the southeast of iran. this study investigates whether these two vowels have the same qualities as the short /i/ an...

This paper is an acoustic phonetic description of the vowels and diphthongs in the Yi county dialect and compares the diphthongized vowels with monophthongs and diphthongs in terms of their temporal structures and spectral characteristics. Results show that rising diphthongs have two targets while falling diphthongs only have one dynamic target. Diphthongized vowels occur as an intermediate cat...

Recent vowel corpora show that there are often clear acoustic differences between vowels produced in different phonetic contexts. We expand on a recent corpus of Northern Standard Dutch (NSD) vowels by including a variety of consonantal contexts. Our results show that there are very clear contextual effects on the spectral and temporal properties of NSD vowels. The most striking effect is the a...

Abstract Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique early Islamic periods to disam-biguate vocalization of important texts, especially Bible. The earliest step this process was implementation ‘diacritic dot’ system, which used a single dot distinguish pairs homographs: ‘ab...

Standard Mandarin (SM) apical vowels have tongue postures similar to the fricative consonants that obligatorily precede them, but are thought to lack the consonants’ fricative noise. Lee-Kim [10] argues that in SM apical vowels, a slight reduction of constriction at the tongue blade or tip reduces fricative noise, essentially resulting in syllabic approximants. Using lingual ultrasound to exami...

This report describes a new approach to obtain specific knowledge about the production of German vowels by Chinese speakers. Experiments have been conducted to acquire both perceptual and acoustic measures of the vowels. 11 Chinese speakers were selected as subjects to read 20 German words. Assessment was conducted by 10 German native speakers. We came up with the conclusion, that the Chinese s...

Neutral vowels are vowels that may intervene between the trigger and target of a harmony pattern even when they bear the opposite value for the harmonizing feature. Despite the significant body of work on and the crucial role of vowel harmony in phonological theory, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the low-level phonetic properties of neutral vowels. We examine a prototypical e...