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Standard German distinguishes voiced (short-lag) and voiceless (long-lag) stops in domain-initial and -medial position with VOT being the most important cue. This phonemic distinction has been neutralized in many dialects but the merger appears to have been reversed in the corresponding regional accents probably due to the increasing influence of the standard language. This apparent-time study investigates the emerging importance of VOT and VCratio (a combined measure of proportional vowel and closure duration) in Bavarian and Saxon, two German regional varieties prone to reverse the merger. To this end we analyzed acoustically minimal pairs with stops in medial and initial position and investigated the integrated effects of VOT and VCratio in perception. VOT is becoming more important in younger speakers and dialectal traces are more pronounced in older participants. While a trading relation between VOT and VCratio was present in the perception of all groups it has only emerged in younger Bavarians' production (possibly reinforced by a greater amount of schwa deletion in this group). The findings are discussed within a usage-based model.

Previous research suggests differences in speech patterns between speakers with foreign accent syndrome (FAS) associated with a neurological (neurogenic FAS) versus a psychological aetiology (functional FAS). Differentiating sub-types holds important clinical implications, affecting the nature of follow-up assessment and treatment. To date, there exist no systematic comparisons between these sub-groups. To investigate possible differences, we employed auditory and acoustic analyses to compare schwa insertion and /r/production in speakers with FAS (12 neurogenic, 5 functional). Schwa insertion and /r/ production demonstrated significant differences between groups. Neurogenic aetiology was associated with higher within and between speaker performance consistency and congruence of derailments with phonetic-phonological and neurological accounts of ‘error’ origin. Individuals with functional FAS showed significant within and between speaker variability, which was poorly accounted for by linguistic and speech motor control explanations. We argue that schwa insertion and differences in /r/ realisations provide reliable and accessible variables for clinicians to employ to support differential diagnosis of functional versus neurogenic speech disorders. Findings are discussed in the context of understanding FAS and the broader context of understanding functional speech and language disorders.

We examine the similarities and differences in the expression of emotion in the singing and the speaking voice. Three internationally renowned opera singers produced “vocalises” (using a schwa vowel) and short nonsense phrases in different interpretations for 10 emotions. Acoustic analyses of emotional expression in the singing samples show significant differences between the emotions. In addition to the obvious effects of loudness and tempo, spectral balance and perturbation make significant contributions (high effect sizes) to this differentiation. A comparison of the emotion-specific patterns produced by the singers in this study with published data for professional actors portraying different emotions in speech generally show a very high degree of similarity. However, singers tend to rely more than actors on the use of voice perturbation, specifically vibrato, in particular in the case of high arousal emotions. It is suggested that this may be due to by the restrictions and constraints imposed by the musical structure.

One of the characteristic features of Midi French, probably stemming from contact with Occitan, is the massive presence of schwa vowels that tend to be deleted in Northern French. To establish whether this extra vowel causes the Southern varieties of French to be even more syllable-timed than the close-to-standard Northern ones, different parameters of rhythm metrics have been applied to stretches of spontaneous and read speech, recorded in Southern and Northern French, as well as in Occitan. Since the results display extensive variability in all computed scores, they do not corroborate our hypothesis, but rather challenge the assumption that French is a typical syllable-timed language.

Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable-timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may lead to varieties of English becoming more syllable-timed. Narratives as told by teenagers of different ethnic backgrounds and elderly speakers were segmented by forced phonemic alignment and measurements of vocalic normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), as an indicator of rhythmic patterns, were calculated. The results revealed that young speakers of non-Anglo background were significantly more syllable-timed than young Anglo speakers and the inner-London speakers were more syllable timed than the outer London speakers. Additionally, there was a correlation between articulation rate and nPVI for the non-Anglo speakers: speakers with a high vocalic articulation rate were more syllable-timed. Changes in the duration of particular diphthongs and schwa may have influenced the overall speech rhythm. The relatively low nPVI for all speaker groups may also indicate London's status as a center of linguistic innovation due to long-standing migration.

This paper focuses on foreign accent characterisation and identification in French. How many accents may a native French speaker recognise and which cues does (s)he use? Our interest concentrates on French productions stemming from speakers of six different mother tongues: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, also compared with native French speakers (from the Ile-de-France region). Using automatic speech processing, our objective is to identify the most reliable acoustic cues distinguishing these accents, and to link these cues with human perception. We measured acoustic parameters such as duration and voicing for consonants, the first two formant values for vowels, word-final schwa-related prosodic features and the percentages of confusions obtained using automatic alignment including non-standard pronunciation variants. Machine learning techniques were used to select the most discriminant cues distinguishing different accents and to classify speakers according to their accents. The results obtained in automatic identification of the different linguistic origins under investigation compare favourably to perceptual data. Major identified accent-specific cues include the devoicing of voiced stop consonants, /b/ ~/v/ and /s / ~/z/ confusions, the ''rolled r'' and schwa fronting or raising. These cues can contribute to improve pronunciation modeling in automatic speech recognition of accented speech.

This article investigates syllabic repairs in Macedonian. It is shown that disparate processes are united in the effort to achieve a single goal: the elimination of extrasyllabic (i.e., unsyllabified) consonants, which constitutes a classic instance of a phonological conspiracy. The conspiracy includes the syllabification of sonorants, a-insertion before rhotics, a-insertion before nasals, and schwa insertion. There are four points of theoretical interest in this article. First, it is argued that Derivational Optimality Theory needs to be modified by admitting an additional level of evaluation: the clitic phrase level. Second, the behavior of rhotics and nasals is different at the same level of derivation: rhotics become syllabic while nasals remain extrasyllabic. Third, Macedonian is a language with two epenthetic vowels, each of which can act as a default vowel, which appears to lead to a ranking paradox. Fourth, OT-CC cannot handle the Macedonian data and is hence inadequate.

This study examines whether the production of words with two phonological variants involves single or multiple lexical phonological representations. Three production experiments investigated the roles of the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of French words with schwa: the schwa variant (e.g., Image ) and the reduced variant (e.g., Image ). In two naming tasks and in a symbol–word association learning task, variants with higher relative frequencies were produced faster. This suggests that the production lexicon keeps a frequency count for each variant and hence that schwa words are represented in the production lexicon with two different lexemes. In addition, the advantage for schwa variants over reduced variants in the naming tasks but not in the learning task and the absence of a variant relative frequency effect for schwa variants produced in isolation support the hypothesis that context affects the variants’ lexical activation and modulates the effect of variant relative frequency.

“The term schwa, comes from Hebrew, where it means ‘emptiness’ and designates a Hebrew vowel of the same quality” (Skander and Burleigh, 2005:37). The schwa sound, whose symbol is [ə] in the IPA system, does not exist in modern standard Turkish Due to this mother tongue interference case, its correct production does not ever correctly take place in the articulation of a great majority of Turkish people because it is not audibly heard. Moreover, when the schwa sound appears in the connected speech, the recognition and production of its phonetic value generally goes unheeded. For example, such words like conclusion, confess, confuse, information, pronunciation, solution, and hundreds of other words are articulated not with a schwa. In addition, due to vowel reduction in English, the shift of all vowels and diphthongs into schwa because of stress shift in vocabulary items makes its recognition and production much more difficult.

Strengthening of underlying schwas to full vowels is a salient characteristic of early child productions. In this paper the development of schwa in longitudinal Dutch child language data is discussed. I explore the possibility that schwa-strengthening is motivated by utterance-final lengthening, which in Dutch leads to a transfer of length from an utterance-final schwa to the vowel preceding schwa. Language learners will replace an utterance-final schwa with a full vowel as long as they lack control over this length-transferring process.

English abounds in lexical consonant clusters, and morpheme-internal consonant clusters can also be created postlexically, by syncope (the deletion of a schwa within a word). In theories that do not recognize empty nuclei, the consonant clusters thus created are usually analysed as coda-onset clusters. This article argues that such syncope-created consonant clusters in English bear a much closer resemblance to so-called branching onsets. I argue that these two categories are not entirely distinct; rather, branching onsets are a special type of the set that includes all syncope-created clusters. I consider the three types of consonant cluster that are often distinguished in English, which I label ‘onset clusters’, ‘medial clusters’ and ‘coda clusters’, and argue, instead, for an alternative system of cluster types which has only two types, each with two subtypes; the main aim of this article is thus to question long-accepted, apparent truisms about consonant clusters.

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of some vowels from the annual Christmas broadcasts produced by Queen Elizabeth II over a 50-year period in order to investigate whether adults adapt to sound changes taking place in the community. The sound change that was analyzed in this paper, which is sometimes known as happY-tensing, concerns the tensing of the final vowel in words like ‘happy’ in British English Received Pronunciation over the course of the last 50 years. In the first part of the study, schwa vowels in Christmas broadcasts separated by 40–50 years were analyzed in order to exclude as far as possible any long-term acoustic effects due to vocal tract maturation. The results of this analysis show a large decrease in both the fundamental and F1, F2, and F4 from earlier to later broadcasts. It is then shown that the Queen's 1950s happY vowel is less tense than in a 1980s corpus of four female speakers of Standard Southern British. A subsequent comparison between the 1950s and 1990s Christmas broadcast happY vowels shows a small change towards the tenser position. It is argued that the vowels exemplified by KIT and happY have undergone phonetic raising in RP, with the latter also having fronted. The Queen has participated in the first of these changes and marginally in the second.

Formant frequency data for Catalan vowels reveal essentially the same degree of expansion for three dialect systems with seven vowels (Valencian, Eastern Catalan, Western Catalan). A slightly larger vowel space dispersion for a fourth system with those same vowels and stressed /c/ (Majorcan) is not clearly associated with a larger vowel system size but rather with a local effect of schwa in repelling neighbouring vowels or with specific requirements on the production of some peripheral vowels. Schwa appears to be targetless or specified for a widely defined mid central target. Intervocalic distances were found to vary according to dialect and to vowel pair, and to compensate with each other such that the maximal formant frequency range between point vowels is kept constant across dialects. These findings are partially in support of the Adaptive Dispersion Theory, i.e., they are in agreement with the claim that vowel system expansion should be proportional to vowel system size but not with the notion that adjacent vowels should be evenly spaced in identical vowel systems. Patterns of vowel variability differ depending on the contextual or non-contextual factors involved, i.e., F1 shows more contextual and token-to-token variation for open vs. close vowels, while F2 exhibits little contextual variation and much token-dependent variation for /i/ and the opposite trend for /u/ and /c/. These patterns are accounted for assuming that random variability for vowels is ruled by the precision involved in achieving a specific articulatory target, and that contextual variability is determined by the vowel articulatory requirements and by the relative compatibility between the articulatory gestures for adjacent vowels and consonants. � 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article examines the influence of phonetic and phonological factors and lexical frequency on accuracy and error types in the production of non-native phonotactics. In Experiment 1, English speakers were presented with non-native word-initial consonant clusters that were varied on several phonetic dimensions. Results showed that speakers are not equally accurate on the production of different illegal sequences. An analysis of lexical frequency statistics demonstrates that the frequency of these sequences in other positions across the lexicon does not correlate with accuracy. An explanation based on phonological knowledge is posited instead. A second experiment on the investigation of the strategies used to repair the illegal clusters indicated that speakers prefer schwa insertion. While previous research has assumed that such repairs are vowel epenthesis, a detailed acoustic analysis indicates that inserted schwas are significantly different than lexical schwas. These acoustic characteristics are compatible with articulatory evidence suggesting that there is a prohibition on applying canonical English consonant cluster coordination to phonotactically illegal sequences, leading speakers to “pull apart” the consonant gestures and causing a transitional schwa to appear on the acoustic record. The ramifications of these results for the role of an abstract phonological level in production are discussed.

A speaker produced schwa-CV disyllables in which consonants were low or high in coarticulation resistance. Articulatory and acoustic measurements verified that the magnitude, but not the extent, of anticipatory coarticulation from the stressed vowel to the schwa was modulated by coarticulation resistance. In a perception experiment, listeners heard schwa-CV disyllables that ended in stressed /i/ or /a/ and made speeded identifications of the stressed vowels. Some disyllables had been cross-spliced so that a schwa vowel that had originally been produced in the context of C/i/ was spliced onto a C/a/ syllable or vice versa. Other disyllables were spliced so that a schwa originally from a C/i/ (or C/a/) context was spliced onto a different C/i/ (C/a/) token. Listeners’ response latencies were slower to cross spliced than to spliced disyllables but only in the context of low rather than high resistant consonants. The outcome is generally consistent with a hypothesis that listeners to speech “parse” the acoustic signal along coarticulatory or phonetic gestural lines and that success in parsing varies with the amount of acoustic evidence talkers provide. However, findings did not suggest “perfect” parsing. Correlations between the amount of acoustic information provided by the speaker and the extent to which listeners were disrupted by cross splicing were nonsignificant.

One advantage of using articulatory gestures in models of speech production is that a single gesture can function as a component in a number of different traditional segments (e.g., the tongue tip constrictions for /t/, /d/, /n/ and /l/). Few such claims, however, have been made with reference to more dorsal tongue gestures such as those in American /r/ and /l/. The present paper tests a proposed connection between the pharyngeal components of English liquids and vowels. Midsagittal MRIs of the vocal tracts of three speakers of American English were collected during the production of all vowels in each subject's inventory, plus /r/ and /l/. Midsagittal distances between the tongue and opposing surfaces were measured at intervals along the length of the vocal tract, and the vocal tract was divided into regions: lower pharyngeal, upper pharyngeal, uvular and oral. Vowel shapes were subtracted point by point from /r/ and /l/, allowing a single RMS difference to be calculated within each region of the vocal tract. Results support the prediction that, at least in some dialects, a single postoral gesture is shared between /l/ and /c:/, and between /r/ and schwa.

This paper investigates the contrasting rhythmic properties of two varieties of English: Singapore English, which is often described as syllable-timed, and British English, which is more usually assumed to be stress-timed. Recordings were made of six speakers of each variety. For each stretch of continuous speech obtained from the recordings, the normalized duration of consecutive syllables (except for the final-syllable) was compared, to derive a variability index (VI). It was found that there is a significantly greater variability in this measure of syllable-to-syllable duration for British English, which supports previous indications that, by comparison, Singapore English might indeed be regarded as being more syllable-timed. Additionally, it was found that there is little evidence of the influence of speaking rate on the measured differences in rhythm, but there is some evidence that the greater frequency of reduced syllables with a schwa in British English contributes to the difference between the two varieties.

The first part of this study investigates temporal factors in the perception of V:C vs. VC: rhymes in Norwegian. To that aim, a listening test was performed with stimuli of the form /mV:Ce / vs. /mVC:e/with varying vowel, consonant closure and schwa duration. For a group of native speakers, boundaries in the perception of /V:/-/V/were established. Both longer consonantal closure and schwa duration appeared to cause a perceptual shortening of the vowel. These results were interpreted by appealing to Kingston & Diehl's (1994) duration ratio hypothesis, which states that the durations of a vowel and a following consonant are mutually enhancing acoustic cues. In two listening tests on speech analogs, listeners judged the duration of the first tone in tone-gap-tone sequences. Mimicking the speech stimuli, these sequences featured varying gap and second tone durations. Longer durations of these two signal parts turned out to perceptually lengthen first tone duration. The divergent results from the speech as opposed to the non-speech stimuli were explained by assuming different perceptual strategies for the two types of signals. While in speech the listeners can rely on well-established temporal patterns, such a framework is absent in the case of non-speech.

The purpose of the present study is to assess the contribution of various phonetic and phonological factors to the perception of global foreign accent. Two native Spanish speakers of fluent but heavily accented English recorded English phrases containing sounds or sequences of sounds whose production is characteristically difficult for native speakers of Spanish. Investigated factors included: those affecting syllable structure (initial epenthetic schwa, non-initial epenthetic schwa (-ed ending)); those affecting vowel quality (vowel reduction, tense-laxness); those affecting consonants (final /s/ deletion, manner (/t∫−∫/), fricative voicing (/z-s/), stop voicing); and those affecting stress (lexical stress and phrasal stress). English-speaking listeners rated extent of foreign accent of the Spanish phrases as originally produced and as edited acoustically. Listeners were sensitive to syllable structure factors, final /s/ deletion, consonant manner, and lexical and phrasal stress, but were not sensitive to voicing differences.

The magnitude and extent of anticipatory coarticulation were examined in groups of fluent and nonfluent aphasic patients and normal control subjects. One- and two-syllable target utterances were elicited at slow and fast rates of speech with or without a consonant intervening between the target consonant and vowel, and with or without a preceding schwa, to manipulate utterance complexity. Acoustic analyses (F2 and centroid frequencies) revealed that both groups of aphasic patients exhibited relatively normal patterns of anticipatory coarticulation. However, small but significant differences among the groups emerged in certain conditions. Surprisingly, increased utterance complexity was not found to reduce coarticulatory effects to a greater degree in the nonfluent relative to the fluent aphasic group. Perceptual tests largely confirmed the acoustic analyses.

The English /l/ is often described as having a finite number of contextually determined allophones: a backer, “velarize d”, allophone in syllable rimes, a fronter allophone in syllable onsets, and a syllabic allophone, a special variant of the back /l/, in stressless syllables. In contrast, Sproat & Fujimura (1993) argued that variation in /l/ quality is a more continuous phenomenon, governed by principles of phonetic implementation determining the timing and extent of an apical gesture and a dorsal gesture for /l/. They claimed that the /l/'s dorsum-backing gesture is attracted to the syllable nucleus. Therefore in rimes, dorsum backing begins well before the apical gesture, and the longer the rime, the more extensive the backing. In onsets, on the other hand, the dorsum gesture is either simultaneous with, or follows, the apical gesture, which means that /l/ is short, and there is little time for backing. The study reported here investigates the relation between timing and quality in intervocalic onset /l/'s following schwa, a segmental context expected to produce considerable temporal variation across tokens, but which, according to Sproat and Fujimura's model, should not show much variation in degree of backness. Acoustic data from eight female speakers reading in a fluid narrative style shows that onset /l/'s do vary in backness, and suggests that backness is related to gestural timing. Backer onset /l/'s are usually longer, which means that Sproat and Fujimura’s notions of gestural affinity and gestural separation require modification. The tongue dorsum gesture for /l/ appears to avoid temporal overlap with a stressed vowel, whether or not that vowel is in the same syllable. The data also show, however, that longer /l/'s are not always backer: the relation of duration and backness can be complicated by differences in coarticulatory effects of neighboring vowels, or by speaker-specific constraints on absolute degree of backness. All of these contributing factors can be accommodated within a model of phonetic implementation sensitive to prosodic structure.

This acoustic study investigated the extent and nature of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English trisyllabic utterances (/bV1bəbV3b /) where both V1 and V3 were either /a/ or /i/. Primary stress was assigned to either the first or third syllable, and secondary stress was assigned to the other syllable. The study revealed considerable variability among the four speakers in the systematic effects of non-adjacent vowels on one another. The most important result is that coarticulatory effects can, in some instances, extend beyond the bounds that previous research had assumed; both carry-over and anticipatory effects extend from one full vowel, through the medial schwa, and into the midpoint of the other full vowel. In fact, for one speaker, effects of V3 can be seen as early as V1 onset of /a/. This result indicates that the foot does not define the domain over which coarticulatory effects operate. Finally, this study found no evidence of greater carry-over than anticipatory effects.

In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production. Fully 81% of the instances of thiy in the corpus were followed by a suspension of speech, whereas only 7% of a matched sample of thuhs were followed by such suspensions. The problems people dealt with after thiy were at many levels of production, including articulation. word retrieval, and choice of message, but most were in the following nominal.

This paper identifies and provides proper answers to problems in the interpretation of MEOSL as a lengthening process. The paper defines MEOSL as a context-sensitive change that operated only in cases when the unaccented second vowel is weakened to schwa in the open syllable environment of disyllabic words. Some dialectal and interlanguage data are incorporated in order to explain apparent exceptions to the change. In sum, the paper argues that the theory developed in this study has advantages for explaining the details of MEOSL confirmed by historically attested facts like dating and spellings.

First conjugation verbs appear with an unetymological schwa in the 1st person singular of the present indicative and in the present subjunctive in later Old French texts. This feature of ‘schwa generalization’ has been traditionally explained as analogical to verbs in which the vowel had been triggered phonotactically (cf. entrer ) and to the subjunctive of non-1st conjugation verbs. This paper will attempt a reinterpretation of these facts in the framework of natural morphology. It will become clear that schwa generalization cannot be considered an isolated phenomenon for the evolution of French, but does, in fact, perform a vital role in the global change-over from Latin to Old French to Modern French inflectional morphology.

The purpose of this paper is to present a non-linear account of Schwa Deletion in Hindi. Ohala (1987) has argued that her linear analysis (Ohala (1983)) is superior to D'Souza's (1985) non-linear analysis, which yields observationally incorrect outputs. I try to show that while D'Souza's rule of foot formation, on which Schwa Deletion is based, and her theoretical assumptions need to be revised, all the facts relating to the phenomenon have an elegant explanation within the prosodic phonological framework. The various irregularities in the application of the Schwa Deletion rule, which must be stipulated in Ohala's account, are predicted by the independently motivated principles and assumptions of prosodic and lexical phonology. In the end, data pertaining to anti- Antigemination (Odden (1988)) and related phenomena are taken up to provide evidence in favour of (possibly a weaker version of) the OCP.

Subjects listened to one of six versions of an oral reading passage or to one of six versions of a passage presumed to be spontaneous speech. The passages contained randomly inserted schwa interjections at 0, 1, 5, 10, 15, or 20% of the possible juncture points. Listeners classified the passages as “fluent,” “disfluent,” or “stuttered” and made other judgments through semantic differential scales. A factor analysis of the semantic differential scales revealed a speech skill and a speech planning factor. Significant differences in listener reactions to interjections in oral reading versus spontaneous speech were revealed.

The roles of schwa in modern French are reexamined in the light of recent work. It is argued that while structuralists are justified in distinguishing the phonemic function of ⧸ə⧸ from its phonotactic one, this should not be done by totally ignoring ⧸ə⧸ as a glide, since this leads to a distorted view of the rules of French consonantal clustering and syllabification. It is suggested that the syllabic function of schwa should be noted where appropriate, but by using a different diacritic. The use by both structuralists and transformationalists of the ‘phonetic fiction’ of ‘h aspire’ (and similar underlying forms), to account for differences such as that between l'etre and le hetre is rejected for a variety of reasons, notably because it does not account for the facts in a satisfactory way. The difference between such forms should be presented not in terms of phonetic/phonemic differences, but in those of morphophonemic rules relating to the use of particular lexemes.

Six speech samples containing varying amounts of schwa interjections were tape-recorded and presented to 36 male and 36 female listeners. For each sample, listeners were asked to make judgments of fluent, disfluent , and stuttered speech, and to answer the question “Would you recommend speech therapy?” Results indicated that speech samples containing 5% or more interjections evoked a judgment of disfluent speech by a majority of listeners. The sample containing 20% interjections, however, was found to evoke judgments of disfluent and stuttered speech about equally. Varying numbers of listeners recommended clinical services for disfluent speech. In general, the results indicated that (1) the presence of interjections in connected speech is not normal regardless of frequency, (2) fluent speech may not contain interjections in excess of 5%, and (3) with 20% interjections in speech, the distinction between disfluency and stuttering may be blurred.

This paper attempts a new analysis of the complex problem of the behavior and representation of the schwa vowel in Berber. The analysis, which tries to remedy the shortcomings of the previous studies in this area, relies on a theory of syllable structure (first sketched in work by Halle and Vergnaud (1980) ) in which phonological segments are represented in terms of three separate tiers: a tier of distinctive feature specifications called the ‘melody’, a skeletal tier of C's and V's, and a tier of Onsets and Rimes. On the basis of this theory, syllable-building rules are devised for the Kabyle dialect of Berber. A simple rule of schwa insertion seems to fit easily well within these rules. It is shown that the appearance of schwa in different forms is simply a reflex of the general Kabyle scheme for imposing a syllable structure on a string of consonants. The problem of general interest of whether syllabification is assigned at the word or phrase level is also discussed because of its relatedness to the problem of schwa in Berber.

This study presents perceptual and acoustic data on a carefully selected set of part-word repetitions from the speech of adult stutters. Results indicated that the schwa vowel was perceived in only 25% of the repetitions, far less than previously indicated. Spectrographic analysis showed that although abnormal consonant duration and C-V formant transitions characterized the initial segment of the stuttered word, the remainder of the word is identical to its identical to its fluently produced counterpart. The results were interpreted to mean that for the type of dysfluency selected, the articulatory breakdown is confined to the initial consonant, and it is likely that abnormal formant transitions from initial consonant to vowel, when present, are due to deviant formation of the consonant rather than to faulty transition dynamics.