How syllable-timed is Italian? We investigate two contexts for vowel reduction, unstressed syllables and syllables in polysyllabic words. In a production experiment, a large sample of speakers from Tuscany read diand trisyllabic target words with different stress placement in a sentence context. Results showed vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, both in terms of duration and spectral quali...

English listeners largely disregard suprasegmental cues to stress in recognizing words. Evidence for this includes the demonstration of Fear et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 1893-1904 (1995)] that cross-splicings are tolerated between stressed and unstressed full vowels (e.g., au- of autumn, automata). Dutch listeners, however, do exploit suprasegmental stress cues in recognizing native-language...

The present paper explores the patterns of unstressed vowel reduction affecting the three back vowels of Catalan: /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/. In particular, we examine two reduction patterns found in the Catalan dialect spoken on the island of Majorca: (i) the general Majorcan pattern according to which /ɔ/ and /o/ merge to [o] in unstressed position and /u/ remains different (as [u]), and (ii) a pattern...

This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in the presence of the intonational prominence contrast and in the abstraction from the compounding accent condition. A production study was conducted in which 10 speakers produced Persian lexical and reiterant disyllabic minimal stress pairs spoken with and without an accent in a fixed carrier sentence....

Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) on a variety of dimensions. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether acoustic differences between IDS and ADS in English are modulated by prosodic structure. We compared vowels across the two registers (IDS, ADS) in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and in both utterance-m...

The sound system of Inari Saami exhibits a threeway quantity contrast which is similar to some other Finno-Ugric languages – Estonian and Livonian – in several respects. In all these languages the domain of ternary quantity is a disyllabic foot where the first syllable is stressed and the second syllable is unstressed. In this study we investigate the realisation of the ternary quantity contras...

This study was conducted to determine the effect of temperature and moisture stress on exsheathment process and infectivity of the infective larvae of the parasitic nematode Haemonchus contortus. Laboratory conditions were used in which infective (L3) of H. contortus were either subjected to gradually increasing temperatures, decreasing moisture or both. Post stress viability and exsheatment of...

Focus is of communication function in discourse. How it is realized by native speakers has long been in vigorous discussion. However, studies on focus concerning language learners are few, with the ones taking dialects into account even fewer. This study takes eight Zhenjiang dialect speakers as the subjects and investigates if their phonetic and phonological realization of narrow focus in Engl...

Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adultdirected speech (ADS) on a variety of dimensions. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether acoustic differences between IDS and ADS in English are modulated by prosodic structure. We compared vowels across the two registers (IDS, ADS) in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and in both utterance-me...

Russian exhibits a rich pattern of phonological vowel reduction, by which some vowel contrasts are neutralized in unstressed syllables. Recent work in phonology suggests a mechanism by which phonetic vowel reduction--compression of the overall vowel space due to target undershoot--might lead to patterns like Russian. Presenting acoustic data from 9 speakers of Russian, we use Euclidean distance...