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Madurese exhibits a three-way laryngeal contrast in its plosive inventory, distinguishing voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated plosives. Previous studies have investigated some acoustic characteristics of the contrast but have not examined possible dialectal variation in this contrast. The present study aims to discuss the contrast by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vowel quality (F1). Twenty participants (10 Western Madurese speakers and 10 Eastern Madurese speakers) were recruited and instructed to read 150 Madurese words containing plosives. The results showed that an interaction of dialect and gender were significantly correlated with VOT: male Western Madurese speakers produced shorter VOT for voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives than their Eastern counterparts. There was also variation in F1 between gender across dialects: male Western Madurese speakers produced [ə] with a lower F1 than their Eastern counterparts. It was suggested that the variation was possibly due to language contact with Javanese.

Research on Western Armenian (WA) has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and voiced stops (Fairbanks 1948; Vaux 1998; Baronian 2017). Since there is no monolingual community of WA, all speakers are part of a minority language community, and also speak the majority language. The current study examines speakers from two heritage communities of WA: one in Lebanon, where the majority language is Arabic, and one in the US, where the majority language is English. The speakers in Lebanon were found to have a contrast between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, in line with Lebanese Arabic. The speakers in the US were more variable, some having the English pattern of voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops, while others had voiceless aspirated stops, but their voiced stops were variable between voiced and voiceless unaspirated. These results indicate L2 transfer in both communities, leading to two different patterns of voicing in WA.

Burushaski is an endangered language isolate spoken in Hunza, Nager, and Yasin valleys of Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Hunza Burushaski’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated) across five places of articulation (bilabial, dental, retroflex, palatal, and velar). A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), fundamental frequency (f0), first four formants (F1, F2, F3, and F4), spectral moments of stop release bursts (spectral center of gravity, spectral standard deviation, spectral skewness, and spectral kurtosis), and spectral tilt (H1*–H2*, H1*–A1*, H1*–A2*, and H1*–A3*). The data were collected from four Burushaski speakers. The findings indicated that voiceless aspirated consonants exhibited longer Voice Onset Time and higher spectral tilt onsets than their voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated counterparts. The fundamental frequency was raised in both voiceless series. Some acoustic measures (e.g., Voice Onset Time and fundamental frequency) were better indicators of the laryngeal contrasts while others (spectral moments) more reliably distinguished the place contrasts. The results of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) showed that a combination of spectral tilt and Voice Onset Time are the best descriptors of the three laryngeal categories of Burushaski.

The present study has been carried out to investigate the perturbation effect of the voicing of initial stops on the fundamental frequency (F0) of the following vowels in Pahari. Results show that F0 values are significantly higher following voiceless unaspirated stops than voiced stops. F0 contours indicate an initially falling pattern for vowel [a:] after voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops. A rising pattern after voiced stops and a falling pattern after voiceless unaspirated stops is observed after [i:] and [u:]. These results match Umeda (1981) who found that F0 of a vowel following voiceless stops starts high and drops sharply, but when the vowel follows a voiced stop, F0 starts at a relatively low frequency followed by a gradual rise. The present data show no statistically significant difference between the F0 values of vowels with different places of articulation. Place of articulation is thus the least influencing factor.

The electrolarynx (EL) is an electromechanical device that enables patients to produce voice following the surgical removal of their larynx. The purpose of this study is to understand the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Mandarin consonants produced by EL speakers. First, the acoustic characteristics (including speech intensity, consonant duration, spectral peak, and F2 onset) of Mandarin EL consonants are investigated by comparing the EL and normal consonants. Then, a perceptual evaluation of EL consonants is conducted to identify the relationship between acoustical characteristics and perceptual intelligibility. The results suggest three consonant confusion types are mainly responsible for the poor intelligibility of Mandarin EL consonants: (1) the “unaspirated-for-aspirated” confusion caused by the significantly shortened voice onset time of aspirated consonants; (2) the “voiced-for-voiceless” confusion caused by the continuous pulsing of the EL device and low consonant intensity; and (3) the “perceptual omission” caused by low intensity of consonants and / or consonant omission. The results obtained are promising and potential for further improvements in Mandarin EL speech intelligibility.

Shina is an endangered Indo-Aryan (Dardic) language spoken in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Shina’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast across five places of articulation. A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured including fundamental frequency (F0), spectral tilt (H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, and H1*-A3*), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). Voiceless aspirated stops were characterized by higher fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence, compared to voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated stops. These results suggest that Shina is among those languages which have a raising effect of aspiration on the pitch and spectral tilt onsets of the following vowels. Positive correlations among fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence were observed. The findings of this study will contribute to the phonetic documentation of endangered Dardic languages.

The present paper is part of a series of articles dealing with the Sino-Mongol glossary Dada yu 韃靼語/Beilu yiyu 北虜譯語, a little-known lexicographical work dated between 1567 and 1603. The author concentrates on the Chinese transcription of Mongol affricates in connection with the problem of their phonemic qualities and position in the sound system of a transitional late Middle Mongol to early Modern Mongolian dialect as reflected in the glossary. The influence of different historical varieties of Chinese on the glossary’s system of transcriptions is emphasized, such as: (1) the northern koine pronunciation system of the 16th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Northern Pronunciation” (beyin 北音), an ancestor form of Modern Standard Chinese; (2) standard Late Ming Guanhua 官話 sound system of the 15th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Southern Pronunciation” (nanyin 南音), based on Nankingese and other Yangtze watershed Mandarin dialects; and (3) Old Mandarin, a spoken koine of the 12th to 14th centuries that reflects the pronunciation used at the Yuan 元 dynasty capital, Dadu 大都 (later to become Peking). On the basis of the Chinese transcriptions, two series of affricates, an aspirated one ([ʧh], [ʨh], [tsh]) and an unaspirated one ([ʧ], [ʨ], [ts]), can be identified in the sound system of the Mongol dialect of the glossary. An interesting feature of the latter is the presence of voiceless aspirated alveopalatal affricates ʨ [ʨh] and ʥ [ʨ] that may have developed from earlier Middle Mongol palato-alveolars c [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ] before an original *i. As for c [tsh] and ʒ [ts], they are attested in just a few lexical items and may be considered to be marginal allophones of the phonemes c [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ], respectively. The author comes to the conclusion that the structures of both aspirated and unaspirated series are fully identical: each of them consists of a basic allophone ([ʧh] vs. [ʧ]) and two non-basic positional allophones, one of which ([tsh] vs. [ts]) may furthermore be viewed as marginal or problematic due to its highly restricted distribution.

The present study reports a novel case where a simple one-to-one category mapping may develop into a systematic one-to-two mapping over the course of second language acquisition. We examined the split in category mapping of the Mandarin unaspirated stops conditioned by tone by Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese (e.g. Mandarin /ta35/ to Korean lenis [ta] vs. Mandarin /ta55/ to Korean fortis [t’a]). Korean L2 learners and naïve listeners participated in identification tasks in whichf0contours of Mandarin words containing unaspirated stops with short-lag VOTs were digitally manipulated. In word-initial position, learners showed a near-categorical perception from lenis to fortis asf0increased, while most stimuli were identified as fortis by naïve listeners. The effect off0was much smaller in word-medial position, but the group difference remained the same, confirming the two groups’ differential use of phonetic cues for stop identification. Taken together, a substantial reorganization of perceptual cues, namely the promotion off0concurrent with significant underweighting of VOT cues, seems to have taken place during L2 acquisition. The findings were discussed with reference to PAM-L2 whereby the knowledge of the L2 phonological system along with particular phonetic properties of the L2 sounds may have driven a perceptual regrouping of the L2 stop categories.

A general feature observed in foreign language classroom is the usage of communication strategies by the learners in their attempts to manipulate a limited linguistics system to communicate. This research aims to investigate the usage of similar sounding words as a written communication strategy in learning Mandarin. The respondents were 59 second- and third-year Malaysian students learning Mandarin as a foreign language at a public university. An open-ended questionnaire was set to gauge respondents’ perception on the strategies used, and was divided into four parts, namely the demographic data and 3 parts of written tasks. The respondents were required to write a dialogue, answer questions on their hobbies and construct sentences using the words given. A total of 77 data of similar sounding words were found. The results showed that similar sounding words strategy was mostly applied to retroflex, alveolar, affricate, fricative, plosive, aspirated and unaspirated sounds. Another one third of the data consisted of syllables which were formed based on the learners’ understanding of the pronunciation. It was found that the strategy provides constructive help in getting the message across despite the inaccurate pronunciation. The findings also mirror the constructive learning attitude and aggressive struggle put in by the learners, and therefore, a positive strategy that should be encouraged.

This study investigates three aspirated voiceless stop consonants and their unaspirated counterparts produced in Taiwan's Southern Min dialect by 10 laryngeal speakers (LA), 10 speakers with pneumatic artificial larynxes (PA), and 10 oesophageal speakers (ES). Listeners' perceptions of the accuracy of the three groups in producing these six stop consonants were also examined. Each of the voiceless stop consonants /p, pʰ, t, tʰ, k, kʰ/, followed by the vowel /a/, was represented by a Southern Min character and appeared three times on a list in random order. Each character had a consonant-vowel syllable structure, and all were read with Tone 1 (high and level). Voice onset time (VOT) was measured for each stop consonant. A separate group of 20 listeners was then asked to identify the consonants produced by the LA, PA, and ES speakers. The VOT values of aspirated voiceless stop consonants from PA and ES were shorter than those from LA. Although PA and ES had aspiration contrast in their VOT values, perceived accuracy was low for PA (/pʰ/: 16.3%; /tʰ/: 13.5%; /kʰ/: 22.8%) and ES (/pʰ/: 33.7%; /tʰ/: 25.9%; /kʰ/: 31.9%). The mean percentages of correctly identified /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ produced by PA were at chance level. In terms of VOT values, it is recommended that, when producing aspirated voiceless stop consonants, PA and ES elongate the duration between the release of the oral constriction and the onset of their vibratory sound source. Moreover, it is also recommended that further investigation into other phonetic properties that support stop contrast is needed.

The effects of language contact extend well beyond the borrowing of lexical items, and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common structural outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009: 222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, which has been in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one example of this phenomenon: Jones (1984) observes that younger speakers of Patagonian Welsh may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /ptk/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper measures the voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /ptk/ using contemporary conversational speech data from both Patagonia and Wales, for speakers in three age groups (0–29, 30–59, and 60+ years), to examine the effects of Spanish contact on Patagonian Welsh. Results indicate that the tendencies seen in Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /ptk/ with significantly shorter VOT than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.

Yerevan Armenian is a variety of Eastern Armenian with a three-way voicing contrast that includes voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops, but previous work has not converged on a description of how voice quality is involved in the contrast. We demonstrate how voice quality can be assessed in a two-dimensional acoustic space using a spectral tilt measure in conjunction with a measure of spectral noise. Eight speakers produced a list of words with prevocalic word-initial and postvocalic word-final plosives. The results suggest that Yerevan Armenian has breathy-voiced plosives which are produced with closure voicing and a relatively spread glottis that is maintained into a following vowel. These qualitatively differ from some Indic ones in that they do not have an extended interval of voiced aspiration after the closure. For the voiceless unaspirated plosives, most speakers produced acoustically modal voiceless plosives, although two showed evidence for some glottal constriction and tensing. Many acoustic cues contribute to overall reliable discriminability of the three-way contrast in both initial and final position. Nevertheless, closure voicing intensity and aspiration duration together provide a robust separation of the three categories in both positions. We also find that back vowels are fronted after the breathy-voiced plosives, which supports a historical analysis in which early Armenian voiced stops were also breathy, rather than plain voiced.

This study explores the phonetic nature of phonological stop voicing contrast in American English by investigating how phonetic implementation of the voicing contrast is modulated by the prosodic structure along the continuum of phonetic voicing. In particular, the present study examines (1) the effects of two kinds of prosodic strengthening that can arise with prosodic structuring, a boundary-related domain-initial strengthening (DIS) and a prominence-induced strengthening, and (2) the possible enhancement types of linguistic contrasts that can underlie prosodic strengthening. The phonetic voicing was estimated using the Integrated Voicing Index (IVI), taking into account both the voicing lag (positive VOT) and the voiced interval during the closure. Results obtained with initial stops in both trochaic and iambic words are encapsulated as follows. Under the influence of DIS, both voiced and voiceless stops were produced with an increase in voicelessness, showing an enhancement of structurally motivated syntagmatic (CV) contrast. The effect size was larger for voiced stops, yielding a boundary-induced phonetic reduction of voicing contrast. Under the influence of prominence (focus), both voiced and voiceless stops showed an increase in voicelessness only in trochaic words, but this time, it was voiceless stops that showed a far greater effect, resulting in a maximization of voicing contrast—i.e., an enhancement of paradigmatic contrast. Moreover, the reduced voicing for voiced stops under prominence even in the medial position indicates that voiced stops are realized in reference to the phonetic feature {vl. unaspirated} rather than {voiced}. These findings imply that seemingly non-contrastive low-level variation is indeed systematically modulated by the prosodic structure in reference to phonetic representations that regulate the phonetic implementation of phonological contrast in a given language. An alternative account is also discussed in the framework of Articulatory Phonology.

The stop consonants of Indo-Iranian languages are categorized into two to maximum five laryngeal categories. The present study investigates whether Voice Onset Time (VOT) reliably differentiates the word-initial stop laryngeal categories and how it covaries with different places of articulation in ten languages (two Iranian: Pashto and Wakhi; seven Indo-Aryan: Dawoodi, Punjabi, Shina, Jangli, Urdu, Sindhi, and Siraiki; and one Isolate: Burushaski). The results indicated that there was a clear VOT distinction between the voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops. The voiceless unaspirated stops showed shorter voicing lag VOTs than voiceless aspirated stops. Voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive stops were characterized by voicing lead VOTs. In the voiceless unaspirated and aspirated categories, palatal affricates showed the longest voicing lag VOT due to the frication interval of this stop type. In contrast, voiceless unaspirated retroflex stops were characterized by the shortest voicing lag VOT. There were no clear place differences in the voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive categories. The findings of the current study suggest that VOT reliably differentiates the stop consonants of all the languages that contrast two (voiceless unaspirated vs. voiced unaspirated: Pashto and Wakhi) or three (voiceless unaspirated vs. voiceless aspirated vs. voiced unaspirated: Burushaski, Dawoodi, Punjabi, and Shina) laryngeal categories. However, VOT does not consistently distinguish the stop consonants of languages (Jangli, Urdu, Sindhi, and Siraiki) with contrastive voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, and voiced implosive categories.

In the present study, Spanish-English bilinguals’ perceptual boundaries between voiced and voiceless stops (a /b/-/p/ continuum including pre-voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated tokens) are shown to be modulated by whether participants are “led to believe” they are classifying Spanish or English sounds. In Experiment 1, simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals and beginner second-language learners of Spanish labeled the same acoustic continuum in two experimental sessions (Spanish mode, English mode), and both groups were found to display language-specific perceptual boundaries (or session effects). In Experiment 2, early bilinguals and late second-language learners of various levels of proficiency participated in a single session in which, in random order, they labeled nonwords that were designed to prime either Spanish or English language modes. Early bilinguals and relatively proficient second-language learners, but not less proficient learners, displayed mode-specific perceptual normalization criteria even in conditions of rapid, random mode switching. Along with similar ones, the experiments reported here demonstrate that bilinguals are able to exploit language-specific perceptual processes (or norms) when processing speech sounds, which entails some degree of separation between their sound systems.

This paper aims to provide an overview of our current understanding of depressors by offering a comparative perspective of the types of depressors from Bantu, Khoisan and Chinese Wu. Depressor effects in Bantu/Khoisan, on the one hand, and Chinese, on the other, are hardly dealt with together leaving a more holistic approach untapped. This paper begins to bridge that gap by bringing together current findings to establish the full scope of depressor effects, from which future analyses can then build on. It is systematically observed that depressors in these languages are not restricted to voicing only. Rather, they range from voiced and breathy sounds – the most unmarked – to voiceless unaspirated sounds and even voiceless aspirated sounds as the most marked depressor type. The expansion of depressors to voiceless aspirated sounds is particularly interesting, since these sounds are traditionally assumed to correlate with a high pitch which is characteristic of high tone. Thus, the laryngeal configurations for voiceless depressors are examined and compared between Bantu, Khoisan and Chinese Wu. Proposed feature analyses for depressors are also discussed and compared.Keywords: depressors, Bantu, Khoisan, Chinese Wu, laryngeal specification

The surface phonetic details of an utterance affect how ‘native’ a speaker sounds. However, studies have shown that children’s acquisition of context-appropriate variation (sometimes called allophones) is late. This study’s goal was to understand how caregivers use phonetic variation in the production of American English /t/ in child-directed speech (CDS), compared to in adult-directed speech (ADS). We hypothesized that mothers modify their input to children in order to produce more limited variation in CDS than in ADS, to potentially assist children in the development of contrastive phonemic categories. To this end, we recorded eight mothers of children under the age of 2 years in both ADS and CDS conditions. Results reveal that CDS contains significantly more canonical cues to /t/ than ADS does, and fewer non-canonical cue patterns, including fewer unreleased tokens and fewer glottalized tokens in utterance-medial position. Also, we found larger aspiration duration differences in CDS between aspirated singleton [th] vs. unaspirated [t] in /st/ contexts, suggesting that mothers exaggerate this cue to the phonemic context in which the /t/ occurs. Overall, the findings suggest that CDS more clearly signals the phonemic category, which could in turn assist children learn the relationship between the underlying and surface forms.

Believed dialect influences speech perception by linguistically naïve speakers. How much accent-induced bias affects perception of linguistically trained speakers is still unclear. This study experimentally investigates the influence of believed dialect on plosive perception by subjects who were phonetically and phonologically trained. Identical syllables were presented twice to each subject. In one session, the subjects were informed that the variety was a Mandarin dialect which has voiceless unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops; and in the other session that it was a Wu dialect, which has voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and breathy stops. More breathy stops were reported if Wu was the believed dialect. Plosive phonation in Wu is related to lexical tone, and we show that lexical tone causes another bias to plosive perception. This suggests that linguistically trained transcribers are susceptible to higher order linguistic knowledge and it demonstrates the difficulty of avoiding biased perception when the coder forms a belief about the variety that he/she transcribes. We also advocate speech perception models which include a component that accounts for the role ofexpectedsounds.

This work explored how the effects of input modalities on the production of different L2 contrasts may change over the course of L2 phonological development. Spontaneous imitation and orthography reading tasks were framed within a longitudinal investigation tracking the acquisition of Mandarin stops and lexical tones by Korean learners developing from a near-naive to a novice stage. Imitation prompted by identical auditory stimuli across different phases revealed a decline in the production of T3, which was produced as T2 to a greater degree with more Mandarin experience. This somewhat counterintuitive finding suggests that the initial benefits from the salient acoustic properties of T3 were overridden by the knowledge of the L2 sound system, namely T3 being realized as T2 via T3 sandhi, leading to diminishing T2-T3 contrasts over time. The stop production data, on the other hand, demonstrated the overarching impact of the existing grapheme-to-phoneme association on the phonological development of new L2 sounds. Some learners prompted with Pinyin produced Mandarin unaspirated stops (e.g., ) with long aspiration and low-F0 for high-level tones. This phonetically unfaithful mapping arose from the familiarity with English voiced stops that are often adapted as lenis stops [long VOT – low F0] by Korean learners. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that the effects of input modalities are specific to the different stages of early L2 phonological acquisition as well as to the types of L2 contrasts.

En este trabajo se estudian las principales propiedades lingüísticas del pie métrico, unidad fonológica entre la sílaba y la palabra prosódica, indispensable para dar cuenta de la posición del acento y de otros fenómenos fonológicos en las lenguas naturales. Aunque suele considerarse que los pies métricos son máximamente bisílabos, en este artículo se propone que en determinadas lenguas los pies pueden ser máximamente trisilábicos, siempre y cuando surjan de la adjunción de una sílaba átona a otro pie. Para sustentar nuestra propuesta teórica, se presentan diversos argumentos y datos lingüísticos a favor de la inclusión de los pies trisilábicos en el repertorio de posibles estructuras lingüísticas, entre los que destacan: (i) varios casos de alargamiento vocálico en dos lenguas aborígenes australianas, (ii) la distribución de consonantes oclusivas sordas aspiradas y sin aspirar en inglés y (iii) la asignación de acento en la lengua esquimal chugach alutiiq yupik. Se demuestra que, más allá de permitir explicar patrones de acentuación ternaria poco frecuentes, estas estructuras métricas resultan óptimas para dar cuenta de sutiles diferencias entre tipos de sílabas fuertes y sílabas débiles, documentadas en algunas lenguas del mundo.

The Tai dialect spoken in Cao Bằng province, Vietnam, is at an intermediate stage between tonal register split and the accompanying transphonologization of a voicing contrast into a dual-register tone system. While the initial sonorants have completely lost their historical voicing distinction and developed a six-way tonal contrast, the obstruent series still preserves the original voicing contrast, leaving the tonal split incomplete. This paper presents the first acoustic study of tones and onsets in Cao Bằng Tai. Although f0, VOT, and voice quality were all found to play a role in the system of laryngeal contrasts, the three speakers considered varied in terms of the patterns of acoustic cues used to distinguish between onset types, particularly the breathy voiced onset //. From the diachronic perspective, our findings may help to explain why the reflex of modal pre-voiced stops (*b) can be either aspirated or unaspirated voiceless stops.

Objectives: The present study investigated the articulatory contact pressure during the production of bilabial plosives by esophageal (ES), tracheoesophageal (TE), and laryngeal speakers. Methods: The peak contact pressure (PCP) during bilabial plosive production of /CVCVCVCVCV/ syllable strings of /p/ and /ph/ was obtained from 10 ES, 10 TE, and 10 laryngeal speakers of Cantonese. PCP values were obtained by using a pressure transduction system (Iowa Oral Performance Instrument) during speech production. Results: The results showed that ES speakers exhibited a significantly greater PCP value than TE and laryngeal speakers, as revealed by cheek muscle compression force. In addition, the unaspirated bilabial plosive /p/ was associated with a greater PCP than its aspirated counterpart /ph/. Conclusion: The current findings might support the hypothesis of over-exaggerated speech for better intelligibility among alaryngeal speakers. In addition, the increased oral muscular effort could be associated with a compensatory strategy for maintaining a high intraoral pressure or the unique air intake by ES speakers.

An order effect was found in English infants’ discrimination of an Urdu contrast. In Experiment 1 7- and 11-month-old English infants were tested on the Urdu contrast between the affricates /tʃʰ/ and /tʃ/. The order of presentation was counterbalanced: At each age half the infants were habituated to the aspirated and tested on the unaspirated affricate, the other half habituated to the unaspirated and tested on the aspirated. As expected, younger infants discriminated the contrast whereas older infants did not, showing the expected decline in discrimination. Interestingly, order of presentation seemed to affect the older infants’ response. Experiment 2 tested the order effect directly. The results showed no asymmetry in the performance of 7-month olds but clear asymmetry in that of 11-month-olds, who discriminated the contrast only when the non-English-like aspirated affricate was presented first. Experiment 3 tested adult native-speakers of both Urdu and English. Although the English listeners showed a reduced sensitivity to the contrast, there was no effect due to order of presentation of the stimuli in either adult group. The finding of an asymmetry in the infants suggests that infants’ perceptual narrowing for speech sounds may be a more complex phenomenon than has generally been assumed.

We methodically designed and developed a subjective intelligibility testing of Thai speech for initial consonants based on the diagnostic rhyme test (DRT). The Thai DRT for initials (TDRT-I) was designed to equally compare 21 phonemes pairwise, which results in 210 stimulus pairs. The test is well-constructed using real monosyllabic words. TDRT-I have main advantages in that percent intelligibility scores in each stimulus pair as well as confusion patterns across all phonemes can be evaluated and compared. To confirm its validity, we carried out a series of experiments. The subjective intelligibility tests were conducted on 28 Thai normal hearing listeners in four SNR levels (−6, −12, −18, and −24 dB) and subsequently on eight sensorineural hearing loss patients (with and without hearing aids) using clean stimuli. Average intelligibility scores, percent correct responses, and confusion matrices were obtained. Comparisons of confusion patterns in both subject groups showed that /r/ is the most confusable phoneme, while /w/, /j/, and /p/ are among the least. Perceptual representation spaces, derived from confusion matrices, yielded five non-overlapping groupings: glide, glottal constriction, nasality, aspirated obstruent, and a combination of liquid and unaspirated obstruent. The results suggested that patients’ perceptual difficulty could be attributed to the nasality grouping, normally well separated for normal hearing listeners, shifting close to the glottals and aspirated obstruents. Hearing aids (ITC, BTE, and BW types) seemed to improve perception of all phonemes by 10%, with /ʨ h /, /k h /, /s/, and /h/ (all unvoiced) showing significant improvement rate. Lastly, the signal detection theory (SDT) bias values of c among all possible 108 pairs of unvoiced vs. voiced phonemes revealed that normal hearing subjects are in favor of unvoiced phonemes. The hearing loss patients (with and without hearing aids) showed the same bias pattern. Interestingly, the hearing aids seem to substantially increase more biases for the unvoiced category.

The present study examined the possible effects of aspiration and vowel context on lip and jaw movements during production of Cantonese bilabial plosives /p/ and /ph/. VCV syllables were randomly produced by 30 adult native Cantonese speakers. Movement of upper lip, lower lip, and jaw during speech production was recorded using electromagnetic articulography. Kinematic analysis of lip and jaw movements during the opening phase of bilabial plosive production revealed a significant aspiration effect, especially on vertical displacement and velocity of the jaw. Such effects were consistent across all vowel contexts. Similarly, a significant aspiration effect was observed in vertical displacement of the lower lip. These findings suggest that muscular force is the main driving force in the production of unaspirated bilabial plosives.

This acoustic study investigates effects of boundary and prominence on the temporal structure of s#CV and #sCV in English, and on the phonetic implementation of the allophonic rule whereby a voiceless stop after /s/ becomes unaspirated. Results obtained with acoustic temporal measures for /sCV/ sequences showed that the segments at the source of prosodic strengthening (i.e., /s/ in #sCV for boundary marking and the nucleus vowel for prominence marking) were expanded in both absolute and relational terms, whereas other durational components distant from the source (e.g., stop closure duration in #sCV) showed temporal expansion only in the absolute measure. This suggests that speakers make an extra effort to expand the very first segment and the nucleus vowel more than the rest of the sequence in order to signal the pivotal loci of the boundary vs. the prominence information. The potentially ambiguous s#CV and #sCV sequences (e.g., ice#can vs. eye#scan) were never found to be neutralized even in the phrase-internal condition, cuing the underlying syllable structures with fine phonetic detail. Most crucially, an already short lag VOT in #sCV (due to the allophonic rule) was shortened further under prosodic strengthening, which was interpreted as enhancement of the phonetic feature {voiceless unaspirated}. It was proposed that prosodic strengthening makes crucial reference to the phonetic feature system of the language and operates on a phonetic feature, including the one derived by a language-specific allophonic rule. An alternative account was also discussed in gestural terms in the framework of Articulatory Phonology.

The paper investigates using data from Majorcan Catalan the acoustic characteristics, and the vowel context and positional conditions, that contribute to the identification of the unaspirated (alveolo)palatal allophone [c] of /k/ as the palatoalveolar affricate /tʃ/ by listeners, and therefore to the implementation of velar softening in the world's languages. Results from perception tests run on [cV] excerpts reveal that affricate percepts are more likely to occur when the (alveolo)palatal stop appears before /i/ than before /a/, which is in agreement with universal patterns of velar softening, and in word-initial and word-final intervocalic position than word-medial intervocalically and utterance initially. Utterance finally [c] is prone to be heard as the fricative [c]. Affricate identification appears to be associated with context- and position-dependent acoustic cues: high frequency F2 vowel transition endpoints and stop burst spectra, and a long burst, before /i/ and word initially; long range F2 vowel transitions next to /a/, and an intense stop burst in this same vowel context and in intervocalic position. High /tʃ/ identification percentages for [c] in the sequence [uc#u], as well as differences among speakers in producing affricate-like realizations of [c] and among listeners in perceiving the stop as an affricate, are also discussed.

This study addresses the two-way laryngeal contrast of plosives in Tokyo Japanese, which is commonly analyzed as a “true voicing” language. We examine how voicing-related properties of the plosive and f0 of the following vowel varied with the position in the word and in the sentence. We compare word-initial with word-medial positions for words in citation (between two pauses) and for two prosodic conditions in a carrier sentence: with vs. without a preceding pause. In word-initial position, unlike in a typical “true-voicing” language such as French, voiced plosives in Tokyo Japanese show a high devoicing rate, while voiceless plosives are moderately aspirated. A combination of VOT and f0 of the following vowel is used to distinguish the two plosive series. In word-medial position, voiced plosives are frequently prevoiced and voiceless plosives are unaspirated, while f0 does not differ after the two plosive series. This positional variation suggests that the onset-induced f0 effect is enhanced in word-initial position, where the VOT cue is not sufficient, but not in word-medial position, where the plosive voicing contrast is robustly marked by presence vs. absence of phonetic voicing. The differential use of cues in different environments in Tokyo Japanese provides another piece of evidence for the complexity of phonetic implementations of the voicing contrast. Finally, we discuss the enhancement of f0 perturbations as a source of a potential tonal development and ask whether such a development would take place in Tokyo Japanese.

This study examines the production of voiceless unaspirated stops and ejective stops by native (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Q'eqchi' to determine (1) whether there were acoustic differences (in voice onset time and burst duration) between voiceless unaspirated stops and ejective stops and (2) whether L2 speakers were more accurate at producing phones that are similar to the native language (voiceless unaspirated stops) than those that are different (ejective stops). Acoustic analyses of the stops produced by the ten L1 and thirteen L2 Q'eqchi' speakers revealed (1) that L1 speakers make a distinction in voice onset time and at times in burst duration in ejective versus voiceless unaspirated stops, (2) L2 speakers can produce a difference between ejective and voiceless unaspirated stops and (3) L2 speakers are more accurate at producing ejective than voiceless unaspirated stops. These results suggest that L2 speakers are actually less accurate at producing L2 phones that are similar versus less similar to native language phones. Results are discussed in light of current theories of L2 speech learning.

Adult dialect acquisition is typically studied in relatively idiosyncratic situations where adults happen to move to another community. But how does dialect acquisition play out in indigenous minority societies that have systemic adult migration due to exogamy? Do the in-married spouses acquire the local variety? Why or why not? How much do they acquire? We investigated an indigenous Zhuang community in southern China. Sociophonetic analyses of in-married women and local villagers show that the in-married women acquired the local variety in most respects but not in aspirated consonants. To the limits of their phonological ability as adult learners, the wives followed the local sociolinguistic norm: they acquired the husbands’ variety. By contrast, in societies experiencing greater external cross-cultural contact, exogamous women sometimes use their liminal status to challenge such gendered sociolinguistic expectations. Comparing the present study with outcomes in different societies, we lay the foundation for a typology of the sociolinguistics of exogamy. In this way, we help expand the study of language and gender toward new horizons and under-represented social settings.

The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant-fricative sequences. This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not necessary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts. The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact-induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and variationist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics.

This paper proposes a new feature extraction technique using wavelet based sub-band parameters (WBSP) for classification of unaspirated Hindi stop consonants. The extracted acoustic parameters show marked deviation from the values reported for English and other languages, Hindi having distinguishing manner based features. Since acoustic parameters are difficult to be extracted automatically for speech recognition. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) based features are usually used. MFCC are based on short time Fourier transform (STFT) which assumes the speech signal to be stationary over a short period. This assumption is specifically violated in case of stop consonants. In WBSP, from acoustic study, the features derived from CV syllables have different weighting factors with the middle segment having the maximum. The wavelet transform has been applied to splitting of signal into 8 sub-bands of different bandwidths and the variation of energy in different sub-bands is also taken into account. WBSP gives improved classification scores. The number of filters used (8) for feature extraction in WBSP is less compared to the number (24) used for MFCC. Its classification performance has been compared with four other techniques using linear classifier. Further, Principal components analysis (PCA) has also been applied to reduce dimensionality.

This paper presents the results of an investigation of the fortis–lenis contrast in Fenno-Swedish stops. The data show that in utterance-initial position, the two-way contrast is realised as a contrast between unaspirated and prevoiced stops. Word-medially and finally, the contrast is that of voiceless, unaspirated stops and fully voiced stops. Fenno-Swedish is thus another Germanic language, like Dutch, Afrikaans and Yiddish, that has a contrast between plain unaspirated and prevoiced stops in utterance initial position. The stop contrast in Fenno-Swedish differs from that of Central Standard Swedish, in two ways: (i) In Central Standard Swedish the contrast is between aspirated and prevoiced stops in utterance initial position, whereas it is between voiceless, unaspirated stops and prevoiced stops in Fenno-Swedish; in medial and final position, one series of stops in Central Standard Swedish is voiceless (aspirated, preaspirated or unaspirated) and the other series is fully voiced, whereas in Fenno-Swedish, one series is voiceless and unaspirated and the other voiced, i.e., in Fenno-Swedish there is no aspiration. (ii) Variation was observed for some Fenno-Swedish speakers in the production of /b d ɡ/, with many tokens being completely voiceless and overlapping phonetically with tokens of /p t k/, whereas there is no overlap between the two stop categories in Central Standard Swedish. Stops in Finnish are voiceless and unaspirated. The fact that the aspirated stops have been lost in Fenno-Swedish, and the fact that there are voiceless occurrences of /b d ɡ/ tokens in Fenno-Swedish suggests influence from Finnish. Fenno-Swedish thus appears to pattern with other languages influenced by a language with a different system of laryngeal contrasts.

This article examines the linguistic forces at work in present-day second language and bilingual acquisition of laryngeal contrasts, and to what extent these can give us insight into the origin of laryngeal systems of Germanic voicing languages like Dutch, with its contrast between prevoiced and unaspirated stops. The results of present-day child and adult second language acquisition studies reveal that both imposition and borrowing may occur when the laryngeal systems of a voicing and an aspirating language come into contact with each other. A scenario is explored in which socially dominant Germanic-speaking people came into contact with a Romance-speaking population, and borrowed the Romance stop system.

According to their traditional phonetic definition, voiceless alveolar stops are unaspirated in Hungarian. The voiceless period following their release, however, seems to contain turbulent noise components, similarly to the case of stops identified as aspirated in other languages. The goal of this investigation was to describe the acoustic-phonetic patterns of burst and post-burst voiceless period of Hungarian /t/-realizations. The results show that many of these stops can be considered as slightly aspirated.

Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three laryngeal stop systems and examines the acquisition of the English and German systems by a group of native speakers of Dutch. The analysis reveals that both trained and untrained participants transferred prevoicing from Dutch into English and German but acquired aspiration and thus showed a “mixed” laryngeal system in both their L2 (English) and their L3 (German). Since even untrained participants produced voiceless stops in the target Voice Onset Time range, pronunciation training has only a moderate effect.*

The current investigation examined the development of voice onset time (VOT) in Standard-Greek (SG) and Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children at age levels 2;0-2;5, 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3;5, and 3;6-4;0 years. SG presents with a two-way voicing contrast (voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops) whereas CG is a three-way contrast dialect containing voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and pre-voiced stops. A cross-sectional design was used. The main goals were: (1) to determine the age at which Greek and Cypriot Greek children acquire voicing contrasts, and (2) to examine the mechanism used during the process of acquisition. Stimuli included pseudo words in minimal pair contrasts differing in stop voicing (e.g. ['gaga] vs ['kaka]). Children were taught the target words using fast mapping procedures. Each member within a word pair referred to an unfamiliar object. Audio-recorded samples were analysed from wide-band spectrograms. Results indicated a greater overall variation of voicing patterns for children than adults, in both Greek and Cypriot VOT contrasts. Greek children acquired consistent pre-voicing and short lag aspiration patterns very early on, achieving adult values for VOT contrasts for alveolar and for velar places of articulation as early as 2;0-2;5 years old. On the contrary, a developmental lag in the acquisition of voicing contrasts was noted for Cypriot children as compared to the Greek counterparts. Accounts about the developmental differences among Greek and Cypriot children with respect to the adult VOT contrasts are discussed.

In earlier work, we found that the fortis and aspirated coronal consonants /t h , t′, ts h , ts′, s′/ of Korean have more concomitant tongue and larynx raising than the lenis consonants /t, ts, s/ and that the aspirated consonants have greater glottal opening than the other series. The concomitant tongue and larynx raising and the glottal opening were proposed to be invariant articulatory correlates of the features [+tense] and [+spread glottis], respectively: fortis and aspirated consonants are specified as [+tense] and aspirated as [+spread glottis]; otherwise consonants are [−tense] and [−spread glottis]. The present study aims to determine whether this description generalizes to the full set of Korean plosives, including labials and dorsals. For this purpose, values of lip, tongue and jaw displacements, vertical larynx movements and glottal width in the Korean coronal and non-coronal plosive consonants /t, t h , t′, p, p h , p′, k, k h , k′/ were obtained from midsagittal and coronal MRI data from the same two native speakers as in the earlier work. It is concluded that the feature [±tense] is defined in terms of the tensing of both the primary articulator (lips, tongue blade or dorsum) and the vocal folds and that the feature [±spread glottis] is defined in terms of glottal opening, as in Halle and Stevens [(1971). A note on laryngeal features. Quarterly progress report (vol. 101, pp. 198–212). Cambridge, MA: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT]. These attributes appear to be invariant in Korean, as long as we interpret invariance as relative rather than absolute. This model is shown to provide a better fit to the phonetic data than several alternative proposals.

The purpose of this study is to examine voice onset time as a phonetic correlate of voicing distinction in standard Persian. Issues pertinent to VOT are also addressed: namely, the effect of place of articulation, vowel context and sex of speakers. The VOTs were measured from recordings of five male and five female speakers reading 65 words that contained a full set of Persian oral stops in word initial and intervocalic positions. This acoustic experiment indicated that VOT distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops. The results also revealed that Persian uses mainly {voiceless unaspirated} and {voiceless aspirated} categories for [±voice] distinction in initial position and {voiced} and {voiceless aspirated} categories in intervocalic position. Vowel context also affected VOT values but the only significant difference was due to high vowels, which caused the preceding voiceless stop to have a longer VOT. Examining sex differences in the VOT values indicated that for voiced items females produced longer VOTs than males. However, voiceless items displayed no significant sex differences for VOT values. Fundamental frequency (F0) of the onset of the following vowel was also examined as another cue to voice distinction. Although the F0 values of voiceless tokens were higher than those of the voiced ones in each voiced–voiceless category, the results suggest that F0 is not a major cue distinguishing the two stop categories.

This article examines the relationship between the frontness of /u/ and the aspiration of /t/ in both Māori and New Zealand English (NZE). In both languages, these processes can be observed since the earliest recordings dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. We report analyses of these developments for three groups of male speakers of Māori spanning the twentieth century. We compare the Māori analyses with analyses of related features of the speakers' English and of the English of monolingual contemporaries. The occurrence of these processes in Māori cannot be seen simply as interference from NZE as the Māori-speaking population became increasingly bilingual. We conclude that it was the arrival of English with its contrast between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, rather than direct borrowing, that was the trigger for the fronting of the hitherto stable back Māori /u/ vowel together with increased aspiration of /t/ before both /i/ and /u/.

This paper provides articulatory, acoustic and perceptual data in support of the hypothesis that the velar softening process through which /k/ becomes /tʃ/ is based on articulation rather than on acoustic equivalence if operating on unaspirated stops. Production data for unaspirated /k/ are analyzed for five speakers of Majorcan Catalan, where the velar stop phoneme exhibits (alveolo)palatal or velar allophones depending on vowel context and position. Data on several parameters, i.e., contact anteriority and dorsopalatal contact degree, burst spectral peak frequency, energy and duration, and F2 and F3 vowel transition endpoints and ranges, suggest that /tʃ/ may have originated from (alveolo)palatal stop realizations not only before front vocalic segments but also before low and central vowels and word finally. Perception results are consistent with the production data in indicating that the most significant /tʃ/ perception cues are burst energy before /a, u/ and burst duration word/utterance finally. They also suggest that velar softening for unaspirated /k/ before front vocalic segments is triggered by an increase in burst frication energy and duration resulting from the narrowing of an (alveolo)palatal central channel occurring at stop closure release. These findings are in agreement with the existence of contextual and positional (alveolo)palatal stop allophones of /k/, and with evidence from sound change, in the Romance languages.

This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing and aspiration in the speech of six Central Standard Swedish speakers with a view to providing an account of Swedish stop production. The data show that in utterance-initial position the two-way stop contrast is almost always realized as a contrast between prevoiced stops and postaspirated ones. Word-medially and -finally, the contrast is that of a fully voiced stop and, variably, an unaspirated or preaspirated stop. The female speakers show a greater tendency to preaspirate than the male speakers, and the male speakers have a greater tendency for prevoicing than the females. The commonly observed k>t>p ranking of aspiration duration is found for both preaspiration and postaspiration. Possible articulatory and aerodynamic reasons for these findings are discussed. The voicing vs. aspiration contrast that we observe in Swedish is one that has generally been considered to be typologically unusual. It is suggested that, in fact, such languages may not be as unusual as has been claimed in the literature, and that by increasing the level of phonetic detail in the description of stop contrasts in individual languages, the accuracy of typological statements concerning stop production can be improved.

The Athabaskan languages have a particularly rich series of stop contrasts, plain stops and affricates, each exhibiting a three-way laryngeal contrast, unaspirated, aspirated and ejective. Several aspects of this inventory are interesting to phonetic and phonological studies, among them the length and ‘heaviness’ of the releases on the aspirated plain stops, the temporal properties of the ejectives, and the richness of the stop contrast set, approximately 21 distinct segments. This paper is an investigation of the phonetic realization of the stops in five Athabaskan languages: Dene Sųline (CL), Dene Sųline (FC), Dogrib, North Slavey, and Tsilhqut’in, compared with data from Navajo from McDonough [(2003). The Navajo sound system . Kluwer: Dordrecht]. Based on the phonetic patterns in the data, we argue that, among the consonants, the primary organizing feature of the contrasts is a temporal distinction, which we model as simplex–complex contrast, based on Laver [(1994). Principles of phonetics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], in which the temporal properties of medial phase of the segment's articulation play a significant role in the contrast. This classification represents a major divide in the inventory between the unaspirated plain stops (orthographically ( b ) , d, g, ( q )) and the rest of the stops in the inventory. These data suggest first that aspirated plain stops (orthographically t, k ) are mislabeled. Instead, in keeping with much of the early literature on the Athabaskan languages, the t and k phonemes are the affricates /tx, kx/. Second, related to this, long release periods are a characteristic feature of all but the unaspirated stops in the inventory. As such they represent a feature of a larger grouping in the Athabaskan inventory, realized in a temporal domain and persistent in the family, in a pattern likely inherited from the parent language. We model this temporal distinction as a simplex–complex distinction, which separates out the ‘unaspirated’ plain stops, as simplex segments with short offsets, from the rest of the stops, including the plain ‘aspirated’ stops and ejectives, which have complex medial phases with long release periods. Furthermore, the proposal suggests that the languages have exploited the sets of simplex stops and fricatives to build their rich inventories of complex segments, as several linguists have observed. The analysis serves as a basis for understanding sound change and alternation patterns in the family.

Previous studies of aspiration and VOT in Japanese have led to /p/, /t/, and /k/ being inconsistently described as either unaspirated or moderately aspirated. The purpose of this paper is to resolve this issue. Assessing the productions of 13 monolingual Japanese talkers living in Japan, we repeated part of a VOT study that was based on 6 Japanese bilinguals living in the UK. For each talker we assessed the VOT in 44 voiceless stops, including 12 for /p/, 12 for /t/, and 20 for /k/. We found that Japanese VOT for /p/, /t/, and /k/ was 30.0, 28.5, and 56.7 ms, respectively, and longer than the VOT of two short lag comparison groups and shorter than the VOT of two long lag comparison groups. We conclude that Japanese voiceless stops have an intermediate degree of aspiration and constitute an exception to the short lag and long lag dichotomy of voiceless stops said to characterize many languages.

Laryngeal realism (Honeybone 2005) holds that thoroughly voiced stops in a language like Dutch will be represented phonologically with the feature [voice], leaving the voiceless unaspirated stops laryngeally neutral, whereas the typically aspirated stops of a language like German are marked with the feature [spread glottis], rendering the passively voiced stops in this language neutral. These two languages also merge laryngeal oppositions in final environments, Dutch undergoing final devoicing but German final fortition. We apply the findings of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004, 2006b) to these distinctions in final laryngeal neutralisation, underscoring that the evolutionary approach to phonological alternation allows for non-assimilatory feature addition as well as loss. We examine in particular the known history of final fortition in German and find that the reference standard form of the language has evolved an alignment condition to the effect that a fortified syllable edge must match up with the morpheme edge.

Māori is the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Traditionally the Māori plosive consonants are regarded as unaspirated, in contrast to English voiceless plosives which are strongly aspirated in initial position. This paper traces the increase in aspiration in Māori plosives over time by analysing the Māori and English plosive consonants of three speakers born over a span of nearly 100 years. It shows that both the number of aspirated plosives and the degree of aspiration (measured by VOT) have increased from the oldest speaker (born in 1885) to the youngest speaker (born in 1972) in both languages. There may be some language internal factors at work, but influence from English is a likely cause for this change. The youngest speaker was born before the Māori language revitalization programme was established. The results provide a snapshot of the pronunciation of Māori stops before the development of the kōhanga reo revitalization movement (Māori language nests) in 1982.

The ability of Mandarin esophageal speakers to distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated stops, and to distinguish between different places of articulation of stops were examined. Aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops produced by normal laryngeal (NL) and standard esophageal (SE) speakers were studied. VOT values of the five different stops (/ph, th, kh, p, t/) of Mandarin followed by the vowel /a/ produced by NL and SE speakers were compared. Results from the perceptual experiment indicated that, while voiceless unaspirated stops produced by SE speakers were not signaled with a high level of accuracy, voiceless aspirated stops were perceived correctly by the listeners. Acoustic analysis showed that SE speakers consistently produced shorter VOT than NL speakers. Velar stops were associated with significantly longer VOT values than bilabial and alveolar stops in NL speakers. It was also found that, with the use of the PE segment, SE speakers were still able to use VOT to distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated stops, but they were unable to distinguish between bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation.