An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes "the" and "a". In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish…

A commonly made, but rarely defended, assumption is that phonetic reduction processes apply to hyperarticulated phonetic targets. Results from four experiments reported in this paper support this assumption. (43 references) (Author/LB)

Investigates vowel alternations governed by tensing, particularly pairs without vowel reduction, where several lax vowels alternate with a single tense vowel. Takes alternation data and a strict correlation between spelling and pronunciation of tensed vowels as the basis for an analysis of these vowels' underlying representation. (Author/MES)

It is generally agreed among French linguists that the word has no phonetic or phonological status in French. This position reflects mostly pedagogical considerations and preoccupation with surface phonetic facts and demarcative signals. Investigation of processes of a more abstract nature reveals, however, that a certain number of rules…

In polysyllabic segments, the composition of medial clusters is a reflection of morpheme structure constraints as they apply to initial and final groups of syllables. Also, medial clusters ideally overlap, i.e., have simultaneous membership in both the preceding and following syllable segments. (DB)

French linguists generally agree that the word in French has no phonetic or phonological status. This article examines this position and studies several vowel-consonant sequences, mute-"e" deletion and post-consonantal deletion and suggests that the role of French word-boundaries is more important than is generally acknowledged. (CHK)

CERTAIN FEATURES IN THE MEXICAN PRONUNCIATION OF NASAL CONSONANTS ARE PRESENTED HERE AND LINGUISTIC GENERALIZATIONS ARE FORMULATED--FIRST IN TERMS OF A CURRENT THEORY OF UNIVERSAL PHONOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, AND SECOND IN TERMS OF A REVISED DISTINCTIVE FEATURE FRAMEWORK INCORPORATING THE CHANGES PROPOSED BY CHOMSKY AND HALLE IN "THE SOUND…

A previously prosed rule of absolute neutralization (merging underlying low vowels) is eliminated in an alternative analysis including instead a rule that "breaks" the feature matrix of certain low vowels and redistributes the features of each vowel as a sequence of vowel-like transition plus (a). (Author/RM)

Argues that Saltarelli's rules of Ellipsis and Consonant Lengthening are not needed for forms like "cresce," whatever support they derive from other phonological phenomena. (Author/RM)

This paper attempts to prove that King's (1973) hypothesis of a distinction between the phonological and the phonetic level, if it exists, is not as intuitively recognizable as he indicates. Two rules which King maintains are phonetic (one relating to regressive assimilation, the other to velar anteriorization) are shown not to correspond to his…

The paper presents a set of linguistic phenomena illustrative of the notion "universal tendency". Linguistic generalizations are regarded here not as isolated, "true-or-false" propositions but as embedded in a hierarchy of competing forces. An "exception" to a universal is thus seen as the result of the prevalence of another conflicting universal…

Reviews recent research on English place assimilation (e.g., "sweet" articulated as "sweep" in the environment "sweet boy"), evaluating an account of variation in terms of abstract, underspecified lexical form representations. A hybrid account is proposed where abstract lexical representations can be contacted directly by varying phonetic forms.…

Variability is a term used to cover several types of phenomena in language sound patterns and in phonetic realization of those patterns. Variability refers to the fact that every repetition of an utterance is different, in amplitude, rate of delivery, formant frequencies, fundamental frequency or minor phase relationship changes across the sound…

This book is designed to provide a foundation for independent research in the phonetic study of speech. Eight sections address the following: (1) introductory ideas, semiotics, the relationship between phonetics and phonology, and the concepts of accent, dialect, and language; (2) the phonetic analysis of speech and the architecture of phonetic…