Two words in present-day Hungarian, the conjunction tehát ‘that is’ and ‘consequently’ and the pronoun ilyen ‘like this’ seem to be undergoing a functional change, acquiring the function of fillers, while retaining their former lexical function, too. Twenty narratives were drawn from the Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Corpus (BEA), to analyze the acoustic-phonetic patterns of these words. Both words showed significant differences in duration depending on function. The first and second formant values of the conjunction tehát showed significant differences depending on whether it was used as a filler or in its original function as a conjunction. The formants of the stressed vowel in the pronoun ilyen did not show any differences with either males or females, but the second formant of the unstressed vowel, depending on function, showed significant variations with male subjects. Apparently, females make an unconscious distinction between the two functions only by varying the time structure of the word. Our data confirmed that these words are indeed undergoing a functional change, which is manifested in changes of their temporal patterns and, to some extent, in the articulation of their vowels.

Many languages have a phonological pattern of regressive voicing assimilation, according to which an obstruent is required to match a following obstruent in voicing (e.g. Russian, Sanskrit). This restriction on the distribution of categories has parallels in the phonetic fact that an obstruent has a longer interval of glottal pulsing when it occurs before a voiced sound than when it occurs before a voiceless sound. It is proposed that the phonological pattern arises diachronically through a reanalysis of the phonetic pattern, beginning with a tendency for listeners to identify an obstruent before another obstruent as matching the latter in voicing. This paper reports on two experiments designed to test premises of this account. A production study explores how obstruent voicing in English is affected by voicing in a following segment. A perception study explores how the identification of voicing categories is impacted by the acoustic effects of following segment context. It is found that listeners tend to identify a fricative as voiceless if it is drawn from the position before a voiceless obstruent, but that a following voiced segment has no significant effect on voicing class identification. Implications for the diachronic account of regressive voicing assimilation are discussed.

The present study sets out to investigate variation due to gender, F0, and/or prosodic position in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec (Oto-Manguean), a language with phonemically breathy, modal and creaky vowels, each associated with a tone. Male and female speakers produced words in five prosodic positions: isolation (with focus, F0 higher than sentence-medial position), initial (focused, high F0), isolation (without focus, mid-range F0), medial (mid-range F0), final (lower F0). Two acoustic measures of phonation, H1-H2 and H1-A3, were made for each vowel. Results were inconclusive as to whether one gender was creakier or breathier than the other, though they did suggest that there was a difference in the production of phonation. In addition, there was also a strong effect of F0 on phonation, but not of position independently of F0. While the three-way phonation contrast was present in all five prosodic positions, it was not always well-defined. The contrast was minimized in isolation with focus (high F0) and initial position (high F0). The results obtained indicate that there is variation in phonation, even in a language with contrastive phonation.

The (inter)dental approximant is a little-studied speech sound in the Philippines and Western Australia. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, providing acoustic and video data from Kagayanen and Limos Kalinga, respectively. The sound is attested in at least fifteen languages. It is contrastive in five Western Australian languages, while in the Philippines it generally patterns as an allophone of /l/ but has emerged recently as a separate phoneme due to contact. It arose independently in the two regions. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters. All of these factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Bengali ( /baŋla/) is an Indo-European language (Indic branch) spoken by over 175 million people in Bangladesh and eastern India (Dasgupta 2003: 352; Lewis 2009). The speech illustrated below is representative of the standard variety widely spoken in Dhaka and other urban areas of Bangladesh.

Itunyoso Trique /itunˈjoso ˈtɾiki/ is an Oto-Manguean language (Mixtecan branch) spoken in the town of San Martín Itunyoso, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of three Trique languages, all of which are spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. According to the 2005 census (INEGI 2005), there are 1,345 inhabitants in the town, virtually all of whom speak Itunyoso Trique as a native language. However, this number does not reflect the total number of speakers, as approximately 30%–50% of the population lives outside of San Martín Itunyoso at any given time. The population of the nearby town of Concepción Itunyoso, with a population of 261 (ibid.), is considered to speak the same dialect. The remaining populations of speakers are found in Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and the United States.

Orsmaal-Gussenhoven is a small village in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant with about one thousand residents. It is located halfway between the towns of Tienen (Brabant) in the west and St.-Truiden (Limburg) in the east, and about 12 km north of the Dutch–French language border, which separates the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) from its southern part (Wallonia). No systematic description of the local dialect is available (for a toponymic study, see Kempeneers 2004). A dictionary including a short grammar is available for the dialect of Melkwezer, 2.5 km to the north of Orsmaal-Gussenhoven (Hondshoven 2003). However, the sound systems of the two dialects are not identical.

Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639–3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes on dependent elements. Features determining class membership include number and animacy. Temne also features extension suffixes which alter the valency or the semantic structure of simple verb stems. The basic word order is Subject–Verb–Object.

As prescribed in the by-laws of the Association and the Permanent Council for the Organisation of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, a call for nominations to elect the new IPA Council (2011–2015) and the IPA-elected representatives to the Permanent Council will start in August 2010. Both parts of the election will be held in November 2010. Twenty members of the IPA Council will be elected in November. The Council-elect will elect 10 additional members in March 2011. The new Council (30 members) will elect the Executive Committee in June 2011.