In this 2005 interview, Peter Ladefoged, Distinguished Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at UCLA and USC Adjunct Professor, spoke candidly about his long and distinguished career as a scholar and instructor, as a former President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and as an editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA). Professor Ladefoged died on 24 January 2006, and numerous tributes to him have since appeared, including in JIPA 36.1 (June 2006). Among the topics treated in this interview are: the history and future of phonetics, the founding and growth of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory, and Ladefoged's views on scholarly writing and on the place of phonetics both within linguistics and within humanistic and social scientific disciplines, more broadly. Professor Ladefoged had read proofs of the interview and approved the text, which was completed in the fall of 2005. The text of this interview was originally published in Semiotica 158 (2006) and is reprinted here with permission from Mouton de Gruyter.

This paper investigates whether or not there are phonetic correlates of prominence at the word level in Tamil that can be associated with word-initial stress. There is no lexically distinctive stress but there are indications in previous work – based on impressionistic judgements and experimental evidence of vowel reduction patterns – that word-initial syllables may be prominent. Sets of words containing segmentally identical syllables in different positions within the word, e.g. [nariku], [kanavu] and [w o:dina] were recorded by five speakers in a carrier phrase. The prosodic properties of the test syllables were compared to establish whether syllable position had a significant effect. No consistent results were found for either duration or loudness: their role at the word level in Tamil seems to be confined to marking intrinsic segmental and quantitative distinctions. Significant differences in F0 related to syllable position would be consistent with initial syllables bearing abstract word-level prominence. This would be marked primarily through the association of phrasal pitch accents, unaccompanied by independent differences of loudness or robust durational effects.

In Guinaang Bontok, there is a phonological contrast between singletons and geminates in all consonants (/p t k ? b d g m n ŋ l s w j/) (Reid 1963, 1973; Thurgood 1997). All phonological geminates except for the oral voiced stop geminates are phonetically long consonants (Reid 1963), allowing a phonological distinction which is primarily based on phonetic duration for nasals, fricatives, liquids, glides and voiceless stops. In a cross-linguistic examination of geminates (Thurgood 1993), there were more languages listed as examples for having stop and nasal geminates than for glide geminates, and it was suggested that alveolar was the cross-linguistically preferred place of articulation for geminate consonants. In this study, it was hypothesized that the cross-linguistically less common length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides, were phonetically less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop and nasal consonants. Similarly, it was hypothesized that contrasts in the cross-linguistically common place of articulation (i.e. alveolar) is phonetically clearer than less common contrasts (e.g. velar). In order to test these hypotheses, duration measurements were conducted on single and geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok. The average durational contrast between short and long glides was smaller than the contrast in stop and nasal consonants. The hypothesis was therefore partially supported.

Previous research has indicated that the H (high) of a nuclear accent may be realized as a flat stretch of contour rather than as a single turning point. Both the duration of this plateau and its alignment within the accented syllable are affected by the segmental and prosodic structure of the utterance. The present work investigates whether a non-structural variable, namely pitch span, also affects the realization of the plateau. Speakers replicated all-sonorant utterances in different pitch spans. Results show that both the duration and alignment of the plateau vary with pitch span but in ways different from the way they vary with prosodic structure. Importantly, results also indicate that, when using a proportional measure of alignment, the end of the plateau is anchored within the syllable for each speaker and may be a marker of linguistic structure.

Nasal coda emergence (NCE) (sometimes referred to as ‘restoration’) is the process by which a nasal vowel develops an excrescent nasal coda which may or may not have been present in an earlier form of the spoken language. NCE is operative in the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) dialect of Brazilian Portuguese (CBP), an Ibero-Romance language with five phonemically nasal vowels. The output of NCE (in this language) is usually a velar nasal. It has been suggested that the process may be a function of tongue position (Hajek 1991: 262). To test the null hypothesis that NCE does not correlate with vowel height or anteriority, aerodynamic (nasal and oral flow) signals were obtained from three speakers of CBP. The speakers uttered words ending in nasal vowels while wearing a circumferentially-vented pneumotach split-flow air mask. For comparative purposes, parallel data were gathered from a Hindi and a French speaker as well. The maximum nasal percentage of total flow and the maximum real nasal flow (in ml/s) were measured for each token, averaged across vowels and, in the case of CBP, across speakers. For CBP, the null hypothesis is rejected, lending support to the alternative: vowel height and posteriority indeed condition the emergence of NCE. This suggests a role for the lowered velum and/or raised tongue body in the development of coda obstruents on nasal vowels.

This paper reports results of a quantitative phonetic study of Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language that is of typological interest from a phonetic standpoint. A number of cross-linguistically rare properties are examined. These features include the phonetic realization of Kabardian's small vowel inventory, which contains only three contrastive vowel qualities (two short vowels and one long vowel), spectral characteristics of the ten supralaryngeal voiceless fricatives of Kabardian, as well as the acoustic, palatographic, and aerodynamic characteristics of ejective fricatives, an extremely rare type of segment cross-linguistically. In addition, basic properties of the consonant stop series are explored, including closure duration and voice onset time, in order to test postulated universals linking these properties to place of articulation and laryngeal setting.

For many years, the passage ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) has been used for phonetic research into different languages. However, there are many shortcomings with the passage for the description of varieties of English, including the absence of some sounds, such as /[zcy ]/ and syllable-initial /θ/, problems with the text for the measurement of rhythm, and issues regarding acoustic measurements of /æ/ and /I/. An alternative passage, ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’, is suggested, and measurements of the monophthongs based on recordings of the Wolf passage by three RP British English speakers are compared with similar measurements of the vowels in the NWS passage.

This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [t∫] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2006) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by by /j/, and (b) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of two acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase of /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/. Furthermore, we unexpectedly found that the friction phase of /tj/ is significantly longer than that of /di/. An additional finding not related to the topic of the present study was that the Polish voiceless stops of the four speakers tested showed aspiration, in contrast to phonetic descriptions of these sounds as unaspirated.

This paper presents the results of an electropalatographic investigation into non-durational properties of Italian consonant gemination. The evidence suggests a more palatalised tongue configuration during the production of geminate coronal sonorants and stops than in their non-geminate counterparts. Evidence is also found of differences in the active articulator, with a laminal articulation more characteristic of geminates, and an apical articulation of non-geminates. It is proposed that Italian gemination be thought of more broadly as fortition, and the implications of this are discussed.

In a previous issue of this journal, John Coleman (2004) reviewed the written-up version of a poster I presented at the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona (Battaner-Moro 2003, henceforth BM). The aim of the poster was to discuss the evolution of Firthian prosodic analysis. In his review, Coleman derives from it ‘an ignorance or a neglect of Firth's publications prior to 1948' on my part (p. 211). He focusses his criticisms on the following three statements:

1. ‘Firth never did prosodic analysis.’

2. ‘There is a complete absence of programmatic work in Firth's works.’

3. ‘Prosodic analysis was developed by the members of the London School and not at all by John Firth.’

Gayo is an Austronesian language spoken by some 260,000 people in the central highlands of the Indonesian province of Aceh, at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. Gayo belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages (Ross 1995, Blust 1999). Nothofer (1994) places Gayo along with Nias, Mentawai, Enggano and the various Batak languages in a North-West Sumatra/Barrier Islands subgroup. Five distinct but mutually intelligible dialects are recognised within Gayo: Bukit, Dëret, Cik, Serbejadi and Lues.

Hasselt is the capital of the Belgian province of Limburg, with a population of some 68,000. The town is situated in the northern part of Belgium, about 35 km west of the national border between Belgium and the Netherlands, and 20 km north of the Dutch-French language border, which separates Belgium into a northern part (Flanders) and a southern part (Wallonia). The dialect of Hasselt belongs to the West-Limburgian dialect group (Goossens 1965). The number of dialect speakers is steadily diminishing, and the remaining ones are all bilingual with Standard Belgian Dutch (cf. Verhoeven 2005). An early comprehensive description of this dialect is given by Grootaers & Grauls (1930). The only available dictionary is Staelens (1989).