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How sound change is initiated and propagates in smaller speech communities is not well understood. This paper provides an overview of the main themes, including theoretical and methodological issues, of the special collection on sound change in endangered and small speech communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the Special Issue on Language Contact and Speaker Accommodation, which originates from the conference Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) held at the University of Lecce, Italy, in 2019. It discusses the topics of language contact and speaker accommodation, summarizing the contributions included in the Special Issue, and arguing explicitly in favour of a unitary view of how both temporary and stable changes happen in (part of) the linguistic systems. Accommodation is seen as the same gradual and non-homogeneous process at play in different contact settings. In the introductory sections, a discussion is offered on various situations in which linguistic systems are in contact and on the main factors that may be at play; the following sections offer an overview of the papers included in the Special Issue, which focus on accommodation in L2 and heritage speakers as well as on the time dimension of dialect or language societal contact. Finally, accommodation is discussed as the same process that is at work in any interaction, that may modify temporarily or long-term the system of L2 learners and bilinguals (e.g., immigrants), that usually affects in the long-term the heritage speakers' system, and that only in the long term can lead to language changes involving entire communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hunglish is a term for Hungarian native speakers' English pronunciation. It is a well recognisable and quite homogeneous accent, which is thoroughly described in the literature of second language acquisition. However, this paper proposes that Hungarian speakers living in Romania use a phonologically different Hunglish compared to those living in Hungary. The study is built on direct speech recordings made with 30 Hungarian speakers descending from various parts of Transylvania. Their accent is confronted with the pronunciation of 15 speakers from Hungary, who participated in the same reading experiment. Results indicate that the English pronunciation of the two groups mostly share the same phonetic and phonological features. Only a few persistent phonological differences can be identified; for instance, English open back vowels [ʌ, ɒ, ɑ] are replaced with Hungarian [ɒ] by the Transylvanian informants, and with [a] by the speakers from Hungary; Transylvanian informants preserve more English schwas and diphthongs due to their L2 Romanian, etc. The differences basically originate in the fact that Transylvanian speakers' interlanguage is much more heterogeneous than that of Hungarians', i.e. Transylvanians speak a substandard version of Hungarian as L1, they speak a Transylvanian dialect, they speak Romanian at high level as L2, and they usually speak further foreign languages as well beyond English; these varieties all affect their foreign accent. The paper takes account of the most important characteristics of Transylvanian Hunglish, with a synchronic phono-logical analysis, and a contrastive analysis with the general phonological properties of Hunglish found in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a perception experiment with L1 Polish and L1 English listeners on the affrication of initial English /tr/ and /dr/ (TR) consonant clusters. The goal was to test phonological predictions formulated within the Onset Prominence (OP) framework. OP offers two distinct structural configurations for representing rising sonority onset clusters. One predicts synchronous cluster articulation in English, giving rise to affrication, while the other predicts asynchronous cluster articulation in Polish. Two groups of listeners performed a two-alternative forced choice identification task on stimuli that included affricated clusters, unaffricated clusters, affricates, and CəC-initial words. For L1 English listeners, the unaffricated cluster-initial items induced the slowest responses. For L1 Polish listeners, the lack of affrication facilitated cluster identification, while the CəC-initial words induced the slowed responses. The results suggest cross-language interaction by which Polish listeners equate L1 unaffricated clusters with L2 CəC-initial words, in accordance with the OP proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Montenegro's independence in 2006 and the introduction of Montenegrin as an official language in the Republic of Montenegro paved the way for institutionalized normative work on the Montenegrin language, in which the phonemes ś and ź officially appeared as full-fledged. Thus, the official Montenegrin language is the only South Slavic language and the third, next to Polish and Lower Sorbian, to have in its phonemic stock the soft spirants analyzed in the paper. The purpose of this analysis is to present and compare Polish and Montenegrin spirants ś and ź in terms of genetic description and their contemporary status. Such a comparison does not ignore dialectal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the pair of special issues of Applied Psycolinguistics (this issue, next issue) titled "Towards a just and equitable applied psycholinguistics." This paper motivates the need for this project, details the editorial process, and provides a brief summary of each article appearing in the special issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ícone: Revista de Letras is the property of Universidade Estadual de Goias and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Pakistani schools in Sultanate of Oman use the whole word approach in the practices of English language reading instructions and lack phonetics' knowledge of. Regardless, whether the approach is practical or not, teaching reading skills through these practices at an early age is questionable. This paper will focus on observation and evaluation as research tools, and will concentrate on a phonetics and a phonological analysis of a first-grade learner as a case study. The learner's reading of a text is compared with the reading of a native speaker. The focus of the paper is on two main characteristics of pronunciation; segmental and super-segmental. The analysis demonstrates a significant variation in speech sounds of the learner. The training opportunities in spoken language and reading skills for the teachers may fix the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the social meaning of post‐nasal [ɡ]‐presence, a dialectal variant characteristic of North Western varieties of British English that is claimed to have local prestige. Using a matched‐guise approach, this study reveals the absence of a community‐wide norm with respect to how [ŋɡ] clusters are evaluated as well as diachronic change in the level of awareness speakers have of this variable. Older subjects are not sensitive to the dialectal status of [ŋɡ] and as a result do not evaluate it differently from [ŋ]; the local form is more accessible to evaluation among younger subjects, for whom the northern indexicality is stronger, but at this incipient stage of social meaning there is no agreement on what the content of this evaluation should be. The results speak to questions regarding the development of shared norms, their role in the speech community, and the granularity of social meaning more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human speech has been studied in different areas of knowledge, which range from biometry to phonetics and phonology. In research conducted in such areas, speech samples are necessary resources for obtaining results and validating hypotheses. For this, samples of different speakers and contents are stored in audio files and organized into databases. Such databases allow the continuity, practicality and reliability of studies, eliminating the difficult and time consuming step of data collection. Moreover, they allow consistent comparisons between different studies. However, free access databases in the Portuguese language or recorded in controlled environments are rarely found. The objective of this paper is to construct a free and public database of Brazilian Portuguese, named Corpus CEFALA-1. The database comprises 104 speakers guided by a specific protocol for the collection of audiovisual speech samples recorded in a studio. The paper presents the methodologies for processing, segmentation and organization of speech samples, statistical analysis, application to biometric verification and preliminary phonetic-phonological analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cartaphilus is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses the influence of Phonetics on children's productions of CCV branching onsets (Consonant1 + Consonant2 + Vowel). We aim to analyse whether contexts of greater acoustic or articulatory complexity present lower rates of target productions by the child. We conducted a review on the phonetic characteristics of CCV and an experimental study with 71 children aged 2;0-5;11 years. The study compared the production of liquids and obstruents in CCV and in context-control CV. The results indicate that part of the productions and repair strategies present in children's speech is related to the articulatory-motor domain - namely, the initial preference for lateral liquids, for the labial + lateral combination and the C1 substitutions in C/l/V context. However, child's repairs are not always aimed at phonetic facilitation. We conclude that other factors besides the acoustic-articulatory complexity influence syllable production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a perception experiment with Polish listeners involving vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) in L2 English. A forced-choice rhyming task employing the Silent Center (SC) paradigm revealed relatively uniform effects of stimulus type (SC, Initial, Middle, Final) on accuracy across two proficiency groups, despite greater overall accuracy on the part of the more proficient users. Analysis of individual vowel pairs used in the rhyming trials revealed some effects of proficiency on the degree to which formant movement in the stimuli affected identification accuracy. This research contributes to the relatively sparse literature on VISC in L2 acquisition. Phonological considerations underlying the degree of VISC in Polish and English are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Polish Linguistics is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Resumo: A fala humana tem sido estudada em diferentes áreas do conhecimento, as quais incluem desde biometria até fonética e fonologia. Nas pesquisas realizadas em tais áreas, amostras da fala são recursos necessários para a obtenção de resultados e validação de hipóteses. Para isso, amostras de diferentes locutores e conteúdos são armazenadas em arquivos de áudio e organizadas em bases de dados. Tais bases de dados permitem a continuidade, praticidade e confiabilidade de pesquisas, eliminando a difícil e demorada etapa de coleta de dados. Além disso, permitem comparações consistentes entre estudos diferentes. Entretanto, bases de acesso livre na língua portuguesa ou gravadas em ambiente controlado são raramente encontradas. Dessa forma, o objetivo deste trabalho foi construir uma base de dados pública e gratuita do português brasileiro, nomeada Corpus CEFALA-1. A base de dados reúne 104 locutores orientados por um protocolo específico para coleta de amostras audiovisuais de fala gravadas em estúdio. Este trabalho apresenta as metodologias de processamento, segmentação e organização às quais as amostras de fala foram submetidas, além de análises estatísticas, aplicação à verificação biométrica e análises fonético-fonológicas preliminares do corpus. Palavras-chave: corpus de locutores; biometria; fonética e fonologia; base de dados audiovisual. Abstract: Human speech has been studied in different areas of knowledge, which range from biometry to phonetics and phonology. In research conducted in such areas, speech samples are necessary resources for obtaining results and validating hypotheses. For this, samples of different speakers and contents are stored in audio files and organized into databases. Such databases allow the continuity, practicality and reliability of studies, eliminating the difficult and time consuming step of data collection. Moreover, they allow consistent comparisons between different studies. However, free access databases in the Portuguese language or recorded in controlled environments are rarely found. The objective of this paper is to construct a free and public database of Brazilian Portuguese, named Corpus CEFALA-1. The database comprises 104 speakers guided by a specific protocol for the collection of audiovisual speech samples recorded in a studio. The paper presents the methodologies for processing, segmentation and organization of speech samples, statistical analysis, application to biometric verification and preliminary phonetic-phonological analyses. Keywords: corpus of speakers; biometry; phonetics and phonology; audiovisual database.

This paper analyses unconventional spellings in texts written by students of the sixth grade of Elementary School of two public schools in Ponta Grossa, located in Paraná, in southern Brazil. Specifically, we analyse occurrences of exchanges between graphemes and , which can be associated with the phonological-phonetic phenomenon named rhotacism, e.g. devorver (devolver - 'to return') and anuncial (anunciar - 'to announce'). We follow the theoretical background of the Heterogeneous way of writing organization (Corrêa, 2004). From 201 textual productions (Mendes, 2013), 11 occurrences were found, from which seven (63.6%) correspond to the use of grapheme when is the convention, e.g. pírulas (pílulas - 'pills'), and four (36.4%) to the use of when the convention prescribes , e.g. compral (comprar - 'to buy'). These results evince the dialogical circulation of the writers through oral/literate social practices of what has already been spoken/written (Corrêa, 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental studies in the field of speech perception have demonstrated, since the 1950s, that speech perception is, fundamentally, an instance of categorical processing. Accordingly, the phoneme has been conceived of as a theoretical-descriptive linguistic unit and, simultaneously, as a perceptual category. In this paper, we shall see that, even before the more recent experimental methods, traditional views - such as the British school of descriptive phonetics and the American first structuralists - had anticipated some important aspects of the categorical perspectives on the phoneme. We shall defend that a broader view on this unit, based on the combination from different subdisciplines and theoretical frameworks, could offer us stronger explanations of phonological systems, phonetic processing and the inter-relation between both objects of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the four commentaries reflect a range of different perspectives on my target paper (Vihman, 2017), all basically accept the overall approach, which has been central to my research for 30 years. Each commentary proposes ways of deepening aspects of the ideas expressed or points out limitations and potential areas in which elaboration would be useful. This response takes up each commentary in turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more just applied psycholinguistics requires researchers to explicitly consider the role of power in language, how power shapes fields' notions of what research questions are important and meaningful, and therefore how research data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated. We argue that psycholinguists should widely adopt approaches to studying linguistic processing in ways which acknowledge the role of social ideologies in shaping their outcome, and which reckon with how asymmetrical power relations shape the perception, acquisition, and judgment of both social and linguistic variation. We conclude with a series of guidelines intended to promote characterizations of social and linguistic diversity which accurately reflect the importance of power differentials and which engage ethically with sociopolitical goals of justice and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, results of a study on the geographic variation of the phoneme /r/ in the speech of Chilean professionals of eight different cities (Iquique, La Serena, Valparaíso, Santiago, Concepción, Temuco, Coyhaique y PuntaArenas) perfonning a reading-aloud task are presented. The results show that most of the realizations for the phoneme /r/ correspond to the approximant, apicoalveolar consonant [ɹ], regardless of the participant's geographical origin and the gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol‐based and signal‐based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch‐bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well‐formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP‐based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom‐up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual‐model strategy that separately analyzes symbol‐based top‐down processes and signal‐based bottom‐up processes in speech perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two acoustic studies were carried out with L1 Polish learners of English. One study examined L1 phonetic drift, comparing learners of L2 English who were undergoing intensive L2 phonetic training with quasi-monolingual Polish speakers. The other study looked at L2 acquisition, comparing learners at two different levels of proficiency. Unlike most previous studies of Polish-English bilinguals, VOT data of both voiced and voiceless consonants were analyzed. In both experiments, an asymmetry was observed by which voiced stops were more susceptible to cross-language phonetic influence (CLI) than voiceless stops. These results build on evidence of a similar asymmetry observed in a number of other L1–L2 pairings. Predictions of competing phonological models are evaluated with regard to equivalence classification and phonetic CLI. It is shown that both traditional approaches to the phonological representation of voice contrasts fail to predict the observed asymmetry. An alternative theory, which predicts the asymmetry, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) is becoming increasingly prominent in phonetic descriptions of varieties of English, there is little data on whether and how formant dynamics may shape the vowel systems of other languages. This paper provides cross-language acoustic comparisons of the degree of VISC in Polish and British English. In one study, British English showed a greater concentration of F1 movement earlier in the time course of vowels than Polish. In a second study, proficient Polish speakers of English showed a greater concentration of F1 movement earlier in the time course of vowels while speaking their L2 English than while speaking their L1 Polish. These findings are in line with a proposal formulated in the Onset Prominence (OP) framework, by which the relative degree of formant dynamics in the two languages is attributable to consonantal or vocalic affiliation of the Vocalic Onset (VO) node of structure. Consonantal VO affiliation in English contributes to a greater degree of VISC concentrated earlier in vowel duration. Further empirical patterns associated with the OP representational settings in the two languages are also discussed, along with implications for other languages.

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Copyright of RILCE. Revista de Filología Hispánica is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, S.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we introduce the concept of phonetic compliance, which is defined as the intrinsic individual ability to produce speech sounds that are unusual in the native language, and constitutes a part of the ability to acquire L2 phonetics and phonology. We argue that phonetic compliance represents a systematic source of variance that needs to be accounted for if one wants to improve the control over the independent variables manipulated in SLA experimental studies. We then present the results of a two-fold proof-of-concept study aimed at testing the feasibility of assessing phonetic compliance in terms of gradient. In study 1, a pilot data collection paradigm is implemented on an occasional sample of 10 native French speakers engaged in two reproduction tasks involving respectively vowels and aspirated stops, and data are analysed using descriptive statistics. In study 2, complementary data including L1-typical realizations are collected, resulting in the development of a first set of indicators that may be useful to appropriately assess, and further refine the concept of, phonetic compliance. Based on a critical analysis of the contributions and limitations of the proof-of-concept study, general discussion formulates the guidelines for the following stages of development of a reliable and valid test of phonetic compliance.