The present study will focus on occurrence of fully voiced, devoiced and elided high vowels in Japanese. High vowels elision in Japanese is supported by clear acoustic evidences, even though it is not globally accepted by scholars in the field. Elided vowels, hence, are considered here to have their own status. Moreover, this study is conceived in order to state differences and analogies among ...

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. We adopted the analyses of previous research (Kiu, 1977; Silverman, 1992) and incorporated seeming exceptions. The major rules are: 1) The stressed syllable in English usually bears the high tone in Cantonese, and it includes both primary and secondary stress. 2) If the English word is (historically)...

1. Introduction Early accounts of epenthesis in Optimality Theory focused on epenthesis that results from constraints on prosodic structure, that is, from syllable structure constraints or minimal prosodic category (e.g. minimal word) requirements. McCarthy & Prince (1993a) account for word-internal consonant epenthesis at V-V junctures in Axininca Campa, for example, by ranking ONSET (Syllable...

This study attempts to describe the ability of English Department students, Faculty Humanities, Udayana University in pronouncing final consonant clusters. Consonant clusters are groups consonants that can occur initia lly (onset) and finally (coda) syllable structure. The features each language highly dependent on itself. In English, number at beginning a be up three such as: structure /strʌkt...

A familiar phonotactic constraint in Arabic limits monosyllabic words to CVVC and CVCC syllable type, where VV and CC are long segmentso In this study, we are interested in learning, first, whether vowel length difference serves as a perceptual cue of the length difference between short (single) and long (geminate) consonantso Second, if consonant length difference cues vowel length differenceo...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...

Recent studies have shown that talkers implicitly imitate/accommodate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech [1, 2]. However, it has also been shown that this phonetic imitation effect is not an automatic process [3, 4]: in [3], the artificially lengthened VOT on /p/ was imitated in a non-shadowing task, while shortened VOT (which could jeopardize phonemic contrast) was not imitated, ...

This paper presents the first description of vowel devoicing in Quechua. The characteristics of the process as well as the environments most conducive to its occurrence are reported based on an analysis of 4062 vowels extracted from interviews with 16 speakers of the Cusco Collao dialect. Patterns of Quechua vowel devoicing appear to be generally consistent with the gestural overlap model that ...