This study systematically investigates the temporal organization of American English onset and coda consonant clusters on the basis of kinematic data. Results suggest that consonants in complex onsets are organized globally with respect to the following vowel (c-center organization), while consonants in complex codas are coordinated sequentially. These results support the competitive coupling m...

In Lezgian, a Nakh-Daghestanian language, final and preconsonantal ejectives and voiceless unaspirated obstruents are voiced in certain monosyllabic nouns. This article offers acoustic evidence confirming that the two coda-voicing series are indeed voiced in final position. Based on comparative evidence, it is demonstrated that this phonetically aberrant neutralization pattern is the result of ...

It is known that lexical statistics can influence coarticulation. For example, more confusable words (i.e. those with a low frequency relative to their phonological neighbors) have been shown to exhibit more nasal and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than less confusable words in English and French. In this paper, we give evidence that another type of coarticulation, laryngealized phonation on vow...

This paper is concerned with the influence of vocalic context (/ɪ, ʊ/) and prosodic weakening on the production of the German fricatives /s, ʃ/ in two syllable positions and its relation to the frequent sound change from alveolar to post-alveolar fricatives. Previous studies reported coarticulatory influences of vowel context on fricatives and more coarticulation in prosodically weak positions....

This paper analyses the pronunciation of 24 students in Guangxi, south China, based on their reading a short text. It reports that the occurrence of [w] in place of /v/ is one of the most salient features of their pronunciation. In addition, they tend to use [s] for voiceless TH and [d] for voiced TH, omit dark /l/ in the coda of words such as full and wolf, merge long and short vowels such as ...

Opinion Dynamics models can be, for most of them, divided between discrete and continuous. They are used in different circumstances and the relationship between them is not clear. Here we will explore the relationship between a model where choices are discrete but opinions are a continuous function (the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions, CODA, model) and traditional discrete models. I wi...

This paper reports on an acoustic phonetic study of the VC rhyme in two Australian English dialects. The aim is to examine the timing features of the rhyme to determine the extent to which characteristics of Arabic predict differences between the two dialects. Eight speakers of Standard Australian English and seven of Lebanese Australian English were recorded using a standard word list task. Re...

In this study we investigated the coordination of consonantal and vocalic gestures in Tashlhiyt Berber as a function of their subsyllabic constituency. The aim was to determine whether the syllabification proposed of word initial clusters is reflected in the coordination of articulatory gestures. Two main results were obtained: (1) The timing of consonants in word initial clusters in relation t...

Over the past decades a number of research findings have illustrated the extraordinary robustness and flexibility of human speech perception, which combines sensitivity to surprisingly detailed aspects of systematic context-governed variability in word forms with an ability to extract information about the speaker's intended words from minimal information in a sometimes highly reduced signal. S...

We have investigated whether variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation has changed at a two-decade interval by collecting English and French loanword data in the early 1990s and the year 2011. The comparison of our 2011 data to the early 1990s data has revealed that the overall frequency of final vowel insertion and that of no vow...