In his R-tickle, William Barry (Barry 1997: 35) invites others who may have pondered along similar lines ‘to offer additional complementary or alternative views’. In somewhat belatedly accepting his invitation, I would like to make some remarks on trills, on ‘molar r’, and on rhotacism, followed by some thoughts on the question of the historical primacy of trill, at least within Indo-European.

Since the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in San Francisco in August 1999, two decisive events have set signals for the future directions of phonetics in general and of the International Phonetic Association in particular. First of all, the Permanent Council for the Organization of International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences, the principal, quadrennial international forums for the presentation of phonetic research, and the Council of the International Phonetic Association, the oldest and most prominent scientific society of phonetics, separately voted in favour of a union, with the intention to affiliate the Permanent Council as a standing subcommittee to the IPA Council and to run future Congresses under the auspices of the IPA. This will broaden and intensify the activities of the IPA in all areas of Phonetic Science, even if the phonetic descriptions of languages will remain a traditional focus of attention. Secondly, a decision was taken by the IPA Executive to reach agreement for the Association's Journal to be published by Cambridge University Press. Upon the conclusion of the contract, we can now proudly present the first issue of volume 31 of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association under its new aegis. In conjunction, the two decisions taken by the IPA open up the prospect of a powerful international platform for the distribution of the state-of-the-art and new results in phonetic research.

This paper provides a statistical account of schwa elision and vowel nasalization, and of nasalization and deletion of plosives in a large corpus of German spontaneous dialogues in comparison with an equally large data base of read speech (sentences and texts) from large groups of North German speakers. The phonetic variability of these phrase-level processes is projected onto the articulatory dynamics in global opening and closing gestures, which are taken to be basic phonetic structures of speech communication. Trends for gesture reorganization are derived from statistics, and related to external control factors of word boundary, word class, speech style as well as internal phonetic conditions of gestural make-up and of reduction of articulatory complexity. These synchronic facts of one language are compared with parallel instances from other languages and linked to congruent diachronic data of sound change, thus laying the foundation for generalizable phrase-level patterns of human speech production.

Sources of variability in the speech signal and their statistical treatment are discussed. In the experiment, a total of 3390 vowel spectra obtained from a specially constructed 100-word list read by five male and five female speakers were measured, described in terms of five variables, F1F2, F3, F4, F5 and subjected to statistical analysis. First, the 5D data are normalized, and then treated using a novel discriminant analysis based on a multi-stage comparison of pairs of classes (vowel phonemes) as represented in the data. The data of the five male and the five female voices are analyzed as two separate samples and the results are compared with those obtained using classical discriminant analysis.

Labellers of connected speech corpora encounter a number of cases which are difficult to handle with a linear sequence of segmental labels. Based on material from a corpus of German unscripted speech, this paper presents non-sequential aspects of laryngeal activity for /x/ and /h/, and of supralaryngeal articulation in vocoid exponents of postvocalic /r/. Comparative data for /r/ from a corpus of German read speech indicate that differences across speaking styles may be independent of durational variation. It is discussed how models of the phonology-phonetics interface and Prosodic Analysis can account for the findings.

The custom of lip-plate insertion, as practiced by the Chai people, has an effect on the speech of women since it alters articulators needed for speech production: the lower lip and the lower incisors. Due to the effect of this practice, women cannot produce bilabial and dental consonants in their own language. Vowels are also affected, but the presence of the lip-plate does not affect the tonal system. This study further examines ways in which the lower lip and lower incisor mutilations are compensated for, and the acoustic effects involved in the ‘lip-plate speech’ as well as its implications for phonological theory.

This paper reports on the use of nasalized post-alveolar clicks in a special version of a Chinese nursery rhyme, used in two different so-called dialect areas in China. In one, initial velar nasals are replaced with the clicks, while in Mandarin the nasalized clicks are inserted at the beginning of words with zero initials.

Articulatory explanations are often proposed to account for many of the phonetic patterns found in speech beyond the citation form. Unscripted material from Suffolk English and North German is used to argue that articulatory explanation can too tightly constrain our expectations of the types of phonetic patterns which spontaneous speech contains. It is also shown how articulatory explanation can offer an adequate account of a dataset, stopping short of revealing a larger, more complex set of phonetic patterns.

Informal listening suggests that unscripted Swedish shows a tendency to produce alternating contoid and vocoid articulations which relate to more complex consonant and vowel structures at the phonological level. To test this hypothesis, two unscripted monologues and, for comparison, a careful text reading were analyzed. The speech material was segmented using criteria based on the so-called sonority hierarchy. The results largely corroborated the hypothesis in showing that contoid-vocoid units appeared considerably more frequently in unscripted speech than suggested by conventional phonotactic analysis, and that some reduction effects appeared more frequently in the unscripted than in the read speech. The possibility that this reflects an underlying articulatory organization of spontaneous speech in terms of typologically basic CV units is discussed.

The place of articulation of the Korean plain affricate /c/ and the obstruents /t, s/ is articulatorily and acoustically examined in the intervocalic positions /a―a, a―i, a―u/ taken from four subjects in three dialects. The articulatory data of direct palatograms and linguograms have shown that in these contexts, the plain affricate is not post-alveolar as usually assumed in the literature, but alveolar, just like the alveolar consonants /t, s/, despite some speaker variation regarding the active articulator (tip, blade, anterodorsum). The examination of LPC data has also shown that the affricate is alveolar, like the consonants /t, s/, both for its stop part and for its frication part. The phonetic results are then confirmed by the review of Skalicková's (1960) palatogram of the affricate, and the comparison of X-ray data of the affricate /c/ to those of the Korean obstruents /t, s/ (Skalicková 1960), the Korean vowel /i/ (Han 1978) and post-alveolars in other langauges such as Czech (Danes et al. 1954) and Polish (Wierzchowska 1980). Based on the present phonetic results, we propose that, following IPA usage, the Korean plain affricate is transcribed as /ts/.

In this article we note that diacritics, both in terms of their definition by the IPA, and in studies of transcriber reliability, are treated as a single group. Further, they are usually treated as being used purely to refine the meaning of a sound and, as such, as having less status phonetically than full symbols. It is argued here that diacritics should be classified into at least two major categories, and it is shown how one of these categories is the equivalent of a ‘full’ symbol. Apart from the implications this has for reliability measures, it is argued in conclusion that a more neutral definition of diacritic by the IPA is required.

Quasi-spontaneous dialogues from six languages which, according to recent discussion of rhythmic types, belong to three rhythmic groups – Russian and Bulgarian as ‘stress-timed’, Italian and Greek as ‘syllable-timed’ and Polish and Czech as an intermediate ‘mixed’ type – were examined for the following segmental reduction phenomena: reduction of consonant clusters, weakening of consonant articulation, residual properties from elided consonants in the original context segments, phonetic schwa-isation and syllable elision. The hypothesis tested was that there are comparable reduction phenomena in all languages since all languages allow for variation in the time and effort invested in any given part of an utterance as a means to support the relative weight of elements within the information structure. This hypothesis was borne out in principle, though there were a small number of exceptions across the six languages to the occurrence of reduction types examined.

In this paper I should like to initiate discussion about an IPA diacritic, and suggest that the diacritic ought to be changed. The diacritic concerned is that for velarization.

This paper aims to examine spatio-temporal variability during the production of the lingual consonants /t, d, s, z, k, g l, n, XXX/ in a sample of Greek spontaneous speech. It provides a description of the range of segmental variability and explores the relationship between articulatory and temporal variability. It also discusses instances of common connected speech processes including assimilations and deletions. Data from two Greek speakers producing a monologue was recorded with the technique of electropalatography (Reading EPG system). The results indicated that segmental variability ranges over a continuum from over-articulated to under-articulated forms, i.e. fully articulated tokens to very open articulations. In addition, duration dependent variability was found to be a function of the production characteristics of the consonant. Evidence of both gradient and categorical changes in spontaneous speech were suggested by the data and are discussed with reference to current theoretical frameworks.

The goal of this paper is to compare the degree of anticipatory and carryover phenomena in the behaviour of the velum during the production of French spontaneous speech, and to compare the data with the same speech material, but read. Airflows through the nose and the mouth were taken as an indirect indication of the velum behaviour. French is a language of special interest because there is a phonological contrast between oral and nasal vowels. The results show a tendency for nasal airflow to start before the nasal and a strong propensity to spread after the nasal. No differences could be established between speaking styles (spontaneous vs. read speech) regarding nasal airflow anticipation and carryover.

The present study was designed to test the effects of preceding and following context on the restoration of deleted and assimilated consonant sequences in conversational French speech. Consonant restoration was found to be enhanced by lexical information and by the different sources of information contained in the breath group. The fundamental contribution of breath-group information suggests that the breath group, which is a production unit in conversational speech, might be a perception unit. Interestingly, the results also appear to be in line with Lindblom's claim (1990, 1996) that speakers adapt their utterances to the listeners' needs and maintain sufficient contrast for promoting correct lexical access.

Nuuchahnulth (PHONETICS), often referred to in the literature as Nootka, is a Wakashan language spoken by people living on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Each of thirteen Nuuchahnulth bands represents a different dialect group. Nitinaht (Diitiidath) is usually included in the Nuuchahnulth group, but it is divergent enough to be considered a separate language. The data in this illustration represent the Ahousaht (PHONETICS) dialect.

The Shipibo language is spoken by about 30,000 people in the Ucayali River valley, in the Upper Amazon watershed in the central eastern part of Peru. The language is sometimes also called Shipibo-Conibo after the two main previously distinct ethnic groups which form its speakers. It is a member of the Panoan family and thus is related to such languages as Capanahua, Amahuaca and Chacobo. Panoan languages are principally found in Peru but the family also has members in Bolivia and Brazil. This description is based on the speech of the second author, a 30-year-old male from the village of Dos Unidos de Pachitea. The Río Pachitea flows into the Ucayali, which itself forms one of the major headwaters of the Amazon.

This paper presents data from a small corpus of unscripted speech gathered from one male and one female adult native speaker of Hindi. An acoustic analysis of the data demonstrated changes such as lenition and assimilation. The cases of assimilation included stop plus stop sequences yielding geminates. The results of a perceptual test showed that such ‘pseudogeminates’ are generally perceived as true geminates. Parallels between these phenomena and historical sound changes in Indo-Aryan are also discussed.