The question addressed by this study was whether native speakers of languages that have a relatively large inventory of vowels maximize the phonetic distance between those vowels by using a relatively wider range of tongue positions than speakers of small-inventory languages. Glossometry was used to measure tongue height in the Spanish vowels /i/, /u/, /a/, /e/, and /o/ and in the English vowel...

This study investigates the relationship between variation due to prosodic prominence and variation due to sound change. We compare two hypotheses: under prominence vowels move in the direction of vowel shift, and under prominence vowels are hyperarticulated, and move to positions more peripheral in the vowel space. These hypotheses make competing predictions for two vowels currently undergoing...

Languages differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories; however, cross-linguistic surveys indicate that certain vowels and vowel system configurations are preferred. A cross-linguistic comparison of the acoustic vowel categories of two languages that differ in vowel inventory size, namely, English and Spanish, was performed in order to reveal some of the language-specific and/or univers...

The present study investigates Australian English (AusE) monolingual listeners’ perception of non-native vowels in Dutch, a language with fewer vowels compared to AusE. AusE listeners’ performance was compared to native monolingual Peruvian Spanish (PS) listeners whose L1 contains fewer vowels than Dutch. Results show that compared to PS listeners, AusE listeners were better at discriminating o...

This study continues an approach that uses a unit selection corpus in order to investigate aspects of the phonetic realization of tonal categories. The focus lies on the peak position of German H*L pitch accents, specifically on the question of whether it is influenced by vowel quality. It is confirmed that vowel backness does not affect peak alignment at all. The distinction between tense and ...