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This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.

When Jews were expelled from southern France and went to northern Italy and southern Germany, they lost their language and learned Judeo-Piedmontese and Western Yiddish. However, there are features of these languages that suggest a Shuadit substratum. Jews were expelled from France in the fourteenth century and from Provence in the fifteenth. In Shuadit, the Hebrew letter ד is pronounced [z] medially and finally, reflecting a parallel change in Provencal. It is possible that Jews from Provence brought the pronunciations [juz] and [lamez] with them to Germany, where the final sounds unvoiced, leading to the [yus] and [lames] we find in Western Yiddish. The fact that the names of these letters are different in Western and Eastern Yiddish suggests that these pronunciations arrived in Germany after Eastern Yiddish speakers had already moved to the region of Poland-Lithuania. Some of the Jews fleeing Provence went to the Piedmont region of Italy. Judeo-Piedmontese is the only variety of Judeo-Italian with the front rounded vowel [y]. In the Judeo-Italian of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, however, we find only [u]. Perhaps the presence of [y] in Judeo-Piedmontese reflects a Judeo-Provencal substratum.

Descriptive reports of South Wales English indicate front rounded realizations of thenursevowel (e.g. Wells 1982; Collins & Mees 1990; Mees & Collins 1999; Walters 1999, 2001). However, the specific phonetic properties of the vowel are not depicted uniformly in these studies. In addition, they have relied entirely on auditory descriptions, rather than instrumental measurements. The study presented here is the first to provide a systematic acoustic and articulatory investigation of thenursevowel in South Wales English, and to explore its relationship to realizations of Standard Southern British English /ɜː/ and Standard German /øː/. The results indicate systematic differences between the three vowels, with the South Wales English vowel produced with an open rounded lip posture, yet the acoustic characteristics of an unrounded front vowel. Implications for the notion of ‘front-rounding’ are discussed.

Purpose The study was aimed at investigating what kind of lip positions are selected by Japanese adult participants for an unfamiliar Mandarin rounded vowel /y/ and if their lip positions are related to and/or differentiated from those for their native vowels. Method Videotaping and post hoc tracking measurements for lip positions, namely protrusion and vertical aperture, and acoustic analysis of vowel formants were conducted on participants' production in a repetition task. Results First, 31.2% of all productions of /y/ were produced with either protruded or compressed rounding. Second, the lip positions for /y/ were differentiated from those for the perceived nearest native vowel; although they correlated with them in terms of vertical aperture, they did not in terms of protrusion/retraction. Conclusions Lip positions for a novel rounded vowel seemed to be produced as a modification of existing lip positions from the native repertoire. Moreover, the degree of vertical aperture might be easily transferred, and the degree of protrusion is less likely to be retained in the new lip positions.

27 pages; International audience; This study presents acoustic and electro-magnetic articulography (EMA) data for the back rounded vowel /u/ in preboundary position in French. Five boundary types are examined: the Utterance, the Intonational phrase, the Accentual phrase, the Word and the Syllable. The three speakers studied produce similar acoustic output, with both F1 and F2 becoming lower before stronger prosodic boundaries. However, the Utterance boundary has a particularly strong effect on F1, which is particularly low before this boundary. To achieve the acoustic output observed, the speakers adopt different articulatory strategies at different prosodic boundaries. The strategies observed before the strongest boundaries are tongue dorsum backing (coupled with either raising or lowering, depending on the speaker); tongue tip retraction; and lip protrusion. Somewhat unexpectedly in light of acoustic considerations, lip constriction is observed to be greater before the weaker prosodic boundaries. This result, considered in conjunction with the tongue data and with the lip protrusion data, leads us to suggest that the French speakers in our study are actively aiming to prevent F2 from becoming too high before the weaker prosodic boundaries. We suggest that a high F2 for /u/ may lead to perceptual confusion with the front rounded vowel /y/, which is also present in the French phoneme inventory. This result echoes our previous results for the front unrounded vowel /i/ (Tabain & Perrier, 2005. Articulation and acoustics of /i/ in preboundary position in French. Journal of Phonetics, 33, 77–100), and suggests that the structure of a language's phoneme inventory has important effects on the articulatory strategies adopted by its speakers.

The present study examined the extent to which perceptual performance by American English (AE) individuals predicted their accuracy in producing second‐language (L2) Parisian French (PF) vowels. Three groups of AE participants (no, moderate, and extensive French‐language experience) participated in two perceptual tasks (categorial discrimination and perceptual assimilation), and a production (repetition) task involving PF /y‐œ‐i‐a‐u/ in bilabial /rabVpa/ and alveolar /radVta/ contexts within a phrase. Results from perception tasks correctly predicted overall production difficulties and effects of language experience and consonantal context in L2 production. Paralleling their perceptual patterns, front rounded vowel productions by AE participants were mislabeled more often as back rounded vowels than as front vowels by native‐French speakers. PF /œ/ was produced more accurately with greater L2 experience. Production accuracy of /y/ was also greater with extensive experience, a finding not expected based on...

It is well‐established that the speech perception abilities of monolingual speakers are highly tuned to the sounds of their native language, and that this language specificity affects how monolingual speakers distinguish the sounds of a non‐native language. The present study addressed how the speech perception skills of simultaneous bilingual speakers, who are native speakers of two languages, may be affected by control of active language mode. We tested monolingual (English and French) and simultaneous bilingual (English/French) adults in an identification and rating task with 42 vowels along a continuum from a high back rounded vowel (/u/) to a high front rounded vowel (/y/) that are both phonemic in French, with only the back vowel represented in English. Bilinguals completed the task in three language modes: English, French, and bilingual. As expected, monolingual speakers demonstrated a language‐specific perceptual pattern for the vowels. Bilingual participants displayed different perceptual patterns...

Results of four new experiments are reported which examine American English listeners’ perception of German front rounded vowels. They differ from previous experiments [Kingston et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 2602–2603(A) (1996)] in that listeners were trained with classification of all two‐stimulus subsets of four‐member sets of German vowels as well as with the complete four‐stimulus identification task used by Logan et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 874–876 (1991)] in training. Despite the addition of these easier tasks, as in the previous experiments, both learning and generalization were modest in the four new experiments. One new experiment replicated the result obtained earlier with the front rounded vowel set, /y,Y,o/,œ/, whose members contrast for [tense] and [high]: that any contrast involving mid lax /œ/ is particularly easy. Two other experiments examined the lax front vowels contrasting for [high] and [round], /i,Y,e,œ/; both found correlated feature contrasts to be easier than single feature contrasts, which did not differ in difficulty. The fourth experiment examined the lax round vowels contrasting for [high] and [back], /u,Y,■,œ/, and found all contrasts to be equally easy except the backness contrast between the high vowels, /u:Y/, which was markedly harder. Listeners’ accuracy on a particular contrast thus varies with the set of vowels they have heard. [Work supported by NIH and NSF.]

In French, the acoustic effects of anticipation of a final high front rounded vowel, [y], can be observed in a preceding [i]. This labial anticipation induces a lowering of the formants being measured (F2,F3,F4) both in the middle and, to a greater extent, at the end of the [i] in [iCny] sequences. Although significant, this contextual influence does not jeopardize the acoustic contrast between [i] and [y]. To understand the articulatory basis of these results, acoustic consequences of the gestures involved in the so‐called rounding contrast between [i] and [y] are investigated through articulatory modeling. An [i]‐like area function is simulated with different degrees and combinations of anticipatory lip protrusion, reduction of the area at the lips, and larynx lowering. [i] allows little variation in lip gestures; beyond a limited range of coarticulation [i] shifts acoustically to the region occupied by [y]. While [i] appears to be quantal when we consider variation in tongue constriction, it shows a sensitive response to lip perturbation. In the [iCy] sequences observed, it seems that constraints on distinctiveness prevent a greater labial anticipation.

At the last ASA meeting it was shown that for a set of synthetic vowel–glide–vowel sequences varying in F2 trajectories a range of frequencies can equally well serve as mid segments in patterns identified as English /iwi/ and /uyu/. Many of these mid segments, when lengthed and presented in isolation, resemble the high front rounded vowel [y], so that when short and intervocalic one might expect them to be heard as the glide [inverted h], at least by phonetically trained listeners. However, perceptual data suggest that intended [inverted h] in /i/—/i/ is heard as /w/, while in /u/—/u/ it is /y/. Assuming the syllabifications /i$wi/ and /u$yu/, one might then expect an initial [inverted h] to be heard as /w/ in [inverted hi] and as /y/ in [inverted hu]. Test data indicate otherwise. Unlike /iwi/ and /uyu/, /wi/ and /yu/ show no overlap of F2 values in their initial steady‐state segments—there is instead a range of F2 values for which listeners report both not‐/wi/ and not‐/yu/. Thus for English /w,y/ the steady‐state and transitional intervals have different perceptual weights initially and medially. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. HD‐01994 to Haskins Laboratories.]