Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their co-articulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interlanguage variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Beijing. The recording is that of a 25-year-old female graduate student who has lived all her life in Beijing.

The formants of the eleven monophthong vowels of Standard Southern British (SSB) pronunciation of English were measured for five male and five female BBC broadcasters whose speech was included in the MARSEC database. The measurements were made using linear-prediction-based formant tracks overlaid on digital spectrograms for an average of ten instances of each vowel for each speaker. These measurements were taken from connected speech, allowing comparison with previous formant values measured from citation words. It was found that the male vowels were significantly less peripheral in the measurements from connected speech than in measurements from citation words.

Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disfluencies (e.g. repetitions, repairs, filled pauses, false starts). This paper aims to promote ‘disfluency awareness’ especially in the field of phonetics –which has much to offer in the way of increasing our understanding of these phenomena. Two broad claims are made, based on analyses of disfluencies in different corpora of spontaneous American English speech. First, an Ecology Claim suggests that disfluencies are related to aspects of the speaking environments in which they arise. The claim is supported by evidence from task effects, location analyses, speaker effects and sociolinguistic effects. Second, an Acoustics Claim argues that disfluency has consequences for phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech that are not represented in the speech patterns of laboratory speech. Such effects include modifications in segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality and coarticulation patterns. The ecological and acoustic evidence provide insights about human language production in real-world contexts. Such evidence can also guide methods for the processing of spontaneous speech in automatic speech recognition applications.

Australian English is a regional dialect of English which shares its phonemic inventory with Southern British English through the historical connection with the dialects of the British Isles (in particular London) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Cochrane 1989, Yallop 2003, Leitner 2004). Speakers of present-day Australian English are typically those who are born in Australia or who immigrate at an early age when peer influence is maximal. Such speakers fall into three major dialect subgroups: Standard Australian English, Aboriginal English and Ethnocultural Australian English varieties. Standard Australian English (SAusE) is the dominant dialect and is used by the vast majority of speakers. It is a salient marker of national identity, and is used in broadcasting and in public life. The Aboriginal and Ethnocultural varieties are minority dialects allowing speakers to express their cultural identity within the multicultural Australian context (Cox & Palethorpe 2006, Clyne, Eisikovits & Tollfree 2001).

This study describes the frequencies of the first two formants of monophthongs produced by male RP speakers in four age groups: aged 20–25, 35–40, 50–55, and 65–73 years in 2001. The eleven monophthongs were spoken in /hVd/ contexts by five men in each age group. The eleven words, together with nineteen filler words chosen to distract attention from the purpose of the experiment, were randomized four times and read by each speaker in citation form, for a total of 880 items. F1 and F2 frequencies were measured in Hz and ERB-rate. As expected, in younger compared with older speakers, F1 is higher in /ε/ and especially /æ/, and F2 is higher in /u:/ and /υ/. Other vowels varied in overall dispersion of F1 or F2, but no other differences between age groups were observed. There is evidence that the oldest age group to show change in a vowel's quality has particularly large differences between individuals, so that, collectively, members of that group span much of the quality range from ‘conservative’ (older groups) to ‘progressive’ (younger groups). Such so-called ‘break groups’ have implications for theoretical explanations of sound change.

Finnish talk-in-interaction is shown to use creak and glottal stops distinctively. Creak has turn-yielding functions, and glottal stops have turn-holding functions. Rather than either intuition or the use of large corpora with no attention to the interactional function in which the talk is embedded, the methodology used is that of interactional linguistics (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996 for a prosodic approach), which places emphasis on demonstrating participants' local orientation to linguistic categories within interactional sequences.

In this paper we analyse the extent to which an adult's vowel space is affected by vowel changes to the community using a database of nine Christmas broadcasts made by Queen Elizabeth II spanning three time periods (the 1950's; the late 1960's/early 70's; the 1980's). An analysis of the monophthongal formant space showed that the first formant frequency was generally higher for open vowels, and lower for mid-high vowels in the 1960's and 1980's data than in the 1950's data, which we interpret as an expansion of phonetic height from earlier to later years. The second formant frequency showed a more modest compression in later, compared with earlier years: in general, front vowels had a decreased F2 in later years, while F2 of the back vowels was unchanged except for [u] which had a higher F2 in the 1960's and 1980's data. We also show that the majority of these Fl and F2 changes were in the direction of the vowel positions of 1980's Standard Southern British speakers reported in Deterding (1997). Our general conclusion is that there is evidence of accent change within the same individual over time and that the Queen's vowels in the Christmas broadcasts have shifted in the direction of a more mainstream form of Received Pronunciation.

The accent described here is the present-day version of the accent that has been used as the standard in phoneticians' description of the pronunciation of British English for centuries. The definition of this accent is a matter of heated debate and frequent controversy: the arguments will not be rehearsed here, but the interested reader is recommended to look at Jones (1917 and subsequent) and Wells (2000). The most important aspects of this accent should, however, be made clear.

a. The number of native speakers of this accent who originate in Ireland, Scotland and Wales is very small and probably diminishing, and it is therefore a misnomer to call it an accent of BRITISH English. It is an accent spoken by some English people.

b. The great majority of native speakers of this accent are of middle-class or upper-class origin, educated at private schools and (if of appropriate age) university. This does not mean that the accent cannot be acquired by others: the present author (who attended a state school in the Midlands) originally spoke with an accent with noticeable regional features, but has over many years of teaching the phonetics of English acquired an accent not far from the standard one described here.

c. The majority of speakers of this accent live in, or originate from, the south-east of England.

d. The accent is most familiar as that used by most ‘official’ BBC speakers of English origin (newsreaders and announcers on Radio 4 and Radio 3, and most television channels). It is also frequently heard on the BBC World Service, though that service appears to have adopted the policy of sometimes using newsreaders and announcers with noticeable foreign accents. It is clear that this accent will eventually lose its pre-eminent status in broadcasting as a result of the wish to broaden the social base of broadcast speech, but it will take a long time for this to happen.

This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compared to the most prestigious local accents, viz. those of Florence, Milan and Rome. Historically based on the Florentine pronunciation, and traditionally identified with it, Standard Italian is nowadays used by trained speakers such as stage actors and (but less and less so) radio and TV speakers. The present paper aims at depicting the most salient features of Standard Italian, still a matter of primary reference in language courses, comparing them with the characteristic features of the three most prominent local varieties, with which the foreign learner is most likely to be confronted. All traditional (and sometimes widely debated) issues of Italian phonetics/phonology are addressed in the most ecumenical setting possible.

San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz (Jalapa) Mazatec is unusual in possessing a three-way phonation contrast and three-way level tone contrast independent of phonation. This study investigates the acoustics of how phonation and tone interact in this language, and how such interactions are maintained across variables like speaker sex, vowel timecourse, and presence of aspiration in the onset. Using a large number of words from the recordings of Mazatec made by Paul Kirk and Peter Ladefoged in the 1980s and 1990s, the results of our acoustic and statistical analysis support the claim that spectral measures like H1-H2 and mid-range spectral measures like H1-A2 best distinguish each phonation type, though other measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence are important as well. This is true regardless of tone and speaker sex. The phonation type contrasts are strongest in the first third of the vowel and then weaken towards the end. Although the tone categories remain distinct from one another in terms of F0 throughout the vowel, for laryngealized phonation the tone contrast in F0 is partially lost in the initial third. Consistent with phonological work on languages that cross-classify tone and phonation type (i.e. ‘laryngeally complex’ languages, Silverman 1997), this study shows that the complex orthogonal three-way phonation and tone contrasts do remain acoustically distinct according to the measures studied, despite partial neutralizations in any given measure.

For many years, the passage ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) has been used for phonetic research into different languages. However, there are many shortcomings with the passage for the description of varieties of English, including the absence of some sounds, such as /[zcy ]/ and syllable-initial /θ/, problems with the text for the measurement of rhythm, and issues regarding acoustic measurements of /æ/ and /I/. An alternative passage, ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’, is suggested, and measurements of the monophthongs based on recordings of the Wolf passage by three RP British English speakers are compared with similar measurements of the vowels in the NWS passage.

Polish is a West Slavonic language with about 41 million speakers in Poland and approximately 10 million in diasporas. It can be described as a ‘consonantal’ language, in two respects: (a) it has a rich system of consonant phonemes, as shown in the table, and (b) it allows heavy consonant clusters, especially word-initially.

Electropalatographic and acoustic data reported in this study show differences in closure location and degree, dorsopalatal contact size, closure duration, relative timing of events and formant frequency between clear /l/ and dark /l/ in two dialects of Catalan (Valencian and Majorcan). The two Catalan dialects under investigation differ also regarding degree of darkness but essentially not regarding coarticulatory resistance at the word edges, i.e. the alveolar lateral is equally dark word-initially and word-finally in Majorcan, and clearer in the former position vs. than the latter in Valencian, and more resistant to vowel effects in the two positions than intervocalically in both dialects. With reference to data from the literature, it appears that languages and dialects may differ as to whether /l/ is dark or clear in all word positions or whether or not initial /l/ is clearer than final /l/, and that articulatory strengthening occurs not only word- and utterance-initially but word- and utterance-finally as well. These and other considerations confirm the hypothesis that degree of darkness in /l/ proceeds gradually rather than categorically from one language to another.

Spanish is by far the most widely spoken Romance language, used by about 350 million people mainly in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The language variety described below is formal Spanish spoken in Castile (Central Spain) by educated middle-aged speakers.

The focus of this study is the nature of the secondary effects of place of articulation and vowel quality on VOT (and other acoustic properties) in the production of stops in French and English and the consequences of these factors on the perception of VOT continua by speakers of those languages. Although the largest source of differences in VOT is that associated with the voicing contrast, a number of previous studies indicate that both French and English stops show an effect of place of articulation, with velars showing longer VOT than labials or coronals in accord with the general tendencies noted by Lisker and Abramson (1967; see also Volaitis and Miller 1992). However, some modulation of VOT by vowel context has also been reported. Thus, Fischer-Jørgensen (1972) finds that, in French voiceless stops, VOT is longer before a high vowel than before a low vowel. She further reports an interaction between the place of articulation of the consonant and the identity of the vowel. Specifically, for /p/, the longest voicing lags occur before high rounded vowels (/u/ and /y/); but for /t/ and /k/, they are longest before /i/. Yeni-Komshian, Caramazza and Preston (1977: 43) also report longer voicing lags before /i/ than before /a/ or /o/ for unilingual French speakers.

The Chong language uses a combination of different acoustic correlates to distinguish among its four contrastive registers (phonation types). Electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic data were examined from original fieldwork on the Takhian Thong dialect. EGG data shows high open quotient (OQ) values for the breathy register, low OQ values for the tense register, intermediate OQ values for the modal register, and rapidly changing high to low OQ values for the breathy-tense register. Acoustic correlates indicate that H1-A3 best distinguishes between breathy and non-breathy phonation, but measures like H1-H2 and pitch are necessary to discriminate between tense and non-tense phonation. A comparison of spectral tilt and OQ measures shows the greatest correlation between OQ and H1-H2, suggesting that changes in the relative amplitude of frequencies in the upper spectrum are not directly related to changes in the open period of the glottal cycle. OQ is best correlated with changes in the degree of glottal tension.

The influence of consonant aspiration on the F0 contours of tones in Mandarin Chinese was tested in continuous speech by reference to a minimal pair of syllables, /ta/ and /tha/, which differ only in terms of aspiration. It was found that, consonant aspiration affects the fundamental frequency (F0) of the following vowel. The onset F0 of a tone is higher following unaspirated consonants than following aspirated consonants, and the magnitude of the differences are related to the tone itself as well as the preceding tone. The underlying mechanisms of this effect, as well as its interaction with other effects on F0 contours, are discussed.

This study explores acoustic correlates to the singleton vs. geminate stop length contrast in Japanese. The proposal examined is that multiple acoustic features covary with the stop length distinction and that these features are available in the signal as potential secondary cues. The results support the proposal, revealing the presence of several acoustic features covarying with the singleton vs. geminate contrast in both durational and non-durational domains. Specifically, the preceding vowel is longer, the following vowel is shorter, there are greater fundamental frequency and intensity changes from the preceding to the following vowel, and there is evidence of more creakiness in voice quality for geminate than singleton consonants. It is also demonstrated that the vowel durations, as well as fundamental frequency and intensity changes have fairly strong categorization power.

Clicks are known to occur in English conversation, and have traditionally been assumed to convey affective meaning, generally negative. This is indeed the lay interpretation of clicks. In this paper, we build on the work of Wright (2011a, b), who shows that clicks are also used in the management of sequences of talk. Firstly, we consider similarities and differences in the production of clicks and percussives. We consider some distributional properties of clicks in one variety of English. Drawing on a wide range of conversational data from Britain and the USA, we show some of the functions of clicks and percussives in conversation, which include stance-taking and sequence management (projection of a turn constructional unit and word-search), and handling aspects of timing between turns. We also consider some of the visual behaviours that may accompany clicks. The meaning or function of clicks and percussives, it is argued, must be considered in a fuller interactional context.