Studies have shown that the voice onset time (VOT) of alveolo-palatal affricates is the longest, followed by velars, dental/alveolars, and bilabials. In a reciprocal pattern, closure duration is the longest for bilabials, followed by dental/alveolars, and then velars. Longer VOT is also associated with high and front vowels and tones with rising components. Moreover, the VOT of voiceless unaspirated stops is reported to be longer and closure duration shorter in nasal words. Finally, the voiceless interval has been described as constant in some languages and inconstant in others. Given the evidence of previous research, this study investigates the effects of place, nasality, tone, and vowel quality on the VOT, closure duration, and voiceless interval of the voiced and voiceless obstruents of Northern Pwo Karen (N. Pwo), a language of Thailand. N. Pwo (ISO 639-3 pww) is a ‘true voicing’ language with a three-way distinction in stops, voiceless aspirated and unaspirated affricates, oral and nasal vowels, and six tones (four modal tones and two glottalized tones). In N. Pwo, the place effects on VOT and closure duration pattern reciprocally. Whereas, both VOT and the voiceless interval are longer before oral vowels compared to nasal vowels. VOT is longest before the mid tone, which has a slight rise, while it is the shortest before the falling-glottalized tone. This pattern is reversed for the closure duration of aspirates and voiced stops. Finally, VOT, closure duration, and the voiceless interval are the longest before high and front vowels.

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

Data from about one hundred languages reveal that, in spite of resulting typically from articulatory reduction of peripheral vowels in unstressed position, full schwa may also occur in stressed position in stress languages and in unreduced syllables in languages lacking stress. Formant frequency data reveal that this vowel is mid central, though somewhat shifted to the mid back unrounded area (particularly if long and placed in open syllables and at the edges of words), and exhibits a higher or lower realization depending on the number of mid vowels in the vowel system. In spite of occurring in stressed position, full schwa resembles unstressed schwa in being very short, highly variable and possibly low intensity, which accounts for why it is prone to occur in closed syllables and longer words, and may receive stress only if the remaining vowel nuclei in the word are central and/or short peripheral. Moreover, variability in the F1 and F2 dimensions increases with the number of peripheral mid vowels, which appears to obey symmetry and dispersion principles of vowel space organization.

Phonetic aspects of many languages have been documented, though the breadth and focus of such documentation varies substantially. In this survey, phonetic aspects (here called ‘categories’) that are typically reported were assessed in three English-language collections – the Illustrations of the IPA from the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, articles from the Journal of Phonetics, and papers from the Ladefoged/Maddieson Sounds of the World’s Languages (SOWL) documentation project. Categories were defined for consonants (e.g. Voice Onset Time (VOT) and frication spectrum; 10 in total), vowels (e.g. formants and duration; 7 in total) and suprasegmentals (e.g. stress and distinctive vowel length, 6 in total). The Illustrations, due to their brevity, had, on average, limited coverage of the selected categories (12% of the 23 categories). Journal of Phonetics articles were typically theoretically motivated, but 64 had sufficient measurements to count as phonetic documentation; these also covered 12% of the categories. The SOWL studies, designed to cover as much of the phonetic structure as feasible in an article-length treatment, achieved 41% coverage on average. Four book-length studies were also examined, with an average of 49% coverage. Phonetic properties of many language families have been studied, though Indo-European is still disproportionately represented. Physiological measures were excluded as being less common, and perceptual measures were excluded as being typically more theoretical. This preliminary study indicates that certain acoustic properties of languages are typically measured and may be considered as an impetus for later, fuller coverage, but broader consensus on the categories is needed. Current and future documentation efforts would benefit these considerations being addressed.

Gaza City, with a population of over half a million residents, is the largest urban center and de-facto capital of the Gaza Strip, which itself has a total population of over 1.8 million. As of 2018, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, having fled to Gaza after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These refugee communities originally come from the many historic rural areas that surrounded the Gaza Strip, smaller towns and cities along the Mediterranean coast, as well as areas further afield such as Jaffa, 69 km north of Gaza on the coast, and Bir il-Sab‘, the largest city in the Nagab desert region (see Figure 1). Linguistically, many of these refugee communities are of Palestinian Arabic dialect backgrounds, although varieties of Arabic spoken in the Nagab are classified as originating in the Hijaz area of what is today Saudi Arabia (see Shahin 2007 on Palestinian Arabic and Henkin 2010 on Nagab Arabic).

Eastern Andalusian Spanish (henceforth EAS), is spoken in the east of Andalusia, the southernmost autonomous region of Spain. EAS is most similar to Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS) and to Murcian Spanish, the latter spoken in the autonomous region of Murcia, immediately to the east of Andalusia, and it shares some phonetic traits with EAS, such as vowel lowering. Geographically, Eastern Andalusia includes the provinces of Almería, Granada, Jaén and Málaga, although the precise linguistic delimitation of this area is somewhat more complicated (Figure 1). The main criterion to differentiate EAS from WAS is the lowering or opening of vowels preceding underlying /s/ (Villena Ponsoda 2000). More detailed information on the differences between EAS and WAS can be found in Jiménez Fernández (1999), Villena Ponsoda (2000), Moya Corral (2010) and Valeš (2014). According to Alvar, Llorente & Salvador (1973: map 1696), Cádiz and Huelva in the west are the only Andalusian provinces where vowel lowering before underlying /s/ is not found. As the geographical extent of this phenomenon is widely debated, it is difficult to calculate the precise number of speakers of EAS, but we can assert that this geolect is the native variety of Spanish of approximately 2,800,000 speakers if we take into account the figures from the last census of Andalusia in 2011 (Instituto de Estadística y Cartografía de Andalucía 2011).

Lili Wu Chinese () is a Wu dialect (; ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken by approximately 38,000 people who reside in the town of Lili (), one of the ten major towns in the Wujiang district (). The Wujiang district belongs to the prefectural-level municipality of Suzhou city () in Jiangsu province (), the People’s Republic of China. It is located at the juncture area of the city of Shanghai (), the city of Suzhou, and the city of Jiaxing (), as shown in Figure 1.