In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem ‘augments’ is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) “Principle of Metrical Coherence” and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic appli...

In this study EMA has been used to observe speech articulator movements during successive productions of a variety of novel polysyllabic nonsense words conforming to English phonotactics. Analysis of sensor trajectories comparing initial and final repetitions shows in general reduction of overall duration and distance travelled, lower variability, and fewer acceleration peaks. Comparison of con...

The present analysis examined the interactive effects of articulation rate and position in phrases and utterances on the duration of syllables, consonants, and vowels in read French speech. Three major tendencies emerged. 1) Rate changes primarily affected vocalic segments. 2) Non-prominent (penultimate) syllables, consonants and vowels were more stable than their prominent (final) counterparts...

Japanese shows an asymmetry in the treatment of word-final [n] in loanwords from English and French: while it is adapted as a moraic nasal consonant in loanwords from English, it is adapted with a following epenthetic vowel in loanwords from French. We provide experimental evidence that this asymmetry is due to phonetic differences in the realisation of word-final [n] in English and French, and...

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn po...

Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...

Vowel duration has been an issue in the study of Civili. Although minimal pairs based on vowel duration can be established at both perceptual and physical level, vowel lengthening still occurs in the context of voiced consonants in the language. A comparison between a measured physical duration and an experimentally perceived duration confirms the phonemic distinctiveness of vowel length and in...