Are palatal consonants articulated by multiple tongue gestures (coronal and dorsal) or by a single gesture that brings the tongue into contact with the palate at several places of articulation? The lenition of palatal consonants (resulting in approximants) has been presented as evidence that palatals are simple, not complex: When reduced, they do…

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [t[superscript h]]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [t[superscript h]] or [flapped t] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous…

Examines the conversational behavior of eight-year-old Hawaiian boys and girls of either Caucasian or Japanese descent in same ethnic and same-gender pairs or in mixed-ethnic and/or mixed-gender pairs. Results suggest that temporal speech patterns are stable characteristics of children's vocal behavior, and that these conversational rhythms vary…

Reports on two studies exploring the contrast effects in judgments of messages exhibiting high or low lexical and syntactic diversity. Suggests that listeners are sensitive to variations in lexical diversity but not syntactic diversity. (RL)