The segmental characteristics of the English spoken in Singapore are quite widely described (e.g. Tongue 1979, Platt and Weber 1980, Brown 1988a, Brown 1991). However, the suprasegmental aspects, such as intonation, are less well documented, even though it is widely accepted that it is the suprasegmental aspects that contribute most to the distinctive character of “foreign” accents such as that of Singapore (Brown 1991: 4).

The focus of this study is the nature of the secondary effects of place of articulation and vowel quality on VOT (and other acoustic properties) in the production of stops in French and English and the consequences of these factors on the perception of VOT continua by speakers of those languages. Although the largest source of differences in VOT is that associated with the voicing contrast, a number of previous studies indicate that both French and English stops show an effect of place of articulation, with velars showing longer VOT than labials or coronals in accord with the general tendencies noted by Lisker and Abramson (1967; see also Volaitis and Miller 1992). However, some modulation of VOT by vowel context has also been reported. Thus, Fischer-Jørgensen (1972) finds that, in French voiceless stops, VOT is longer before a high vowel than before a low vowel. She further reports an interaction between the place of articulation of the consonant and the identity of the vowel. Specifically, for /p/, the longest voicing lags occur before high rounded vowels (/u/ and /y/); but for /t/ and /k/, they are longest before /i/. Yeni-Komshian, Caramazza and Preston (1977: 43) also report longer voicing lags before /i/ than before /a/ or /o/ for unilingual French speakers.

Christoph Friedrich Hellwag was probably the first scholar who tried to show the auditory relationships and the relative distances of the vowels (Hellwag [1791] 1991). He described the vowels in a space in which the vowels formed a triangle (He didn't actually use the word ‘triangle,’ but spoke instead about a ‘scale,’ ‘ladder,’ ‘stairs,’ or ‘symmetric scheme’ (Monin 1991: 22)). The cardinal vowel system, created by Daniel Jones, has been a valuable frame work for vowel quality description, but it is partly articulatory, partly auditory.

According to Sweet, the German linguist Johann Andreas Schmeller was the first to use [ə] as a phonetic symbol (Sweet 1877: 175). (Although Sweet gives no bibliographical reference, the work he must have had in mind was Schmeller's Die Mundarten Bayerns of 1821; cf. also Ellis 1874: 1357.) Schmeller uses [ə] for the ‘dumpfe Vocallaut’ in words like Semmel, Nennen, Wetter, and for the second element of various diphthongs, e.g. in dialectal pronunciations of Not(h), Bruder, etc. (Schmeller 1821: 25, 72, 141, and passim). According to Abercrombie (1946), an earlier use of [ə] than Schmeller's is to be found in William Thornton's Cadmus of 1793, for the vowel in run, come, etc. However, neither the original nor the reprint of Cadmus uses a [ə], but the symbol [ℶ].

The style of speech illustrated is that of Educated Colloquial Hungarian of the 1990's as spoken in Budapest. Historically, Standard Hungarian is based on the Eastern dialect, which became a supra-dialectal high prestige variety during the 18th century. The speech on the recording is that of a male speaker in his fifties with an academic background, using a somewhat advanced style of speech as spoken in a formal communicative situation.

Dynamic electropalatography (EPG) (also known as dynamic palatography or palatometry) is a system for recording information about the tongue's contact with the hard palate over time. It is relatively inexpensive and technologically accessible. EPG is safe, provides spatial information on the shape of constriction contact, and allows the collection of reasonable acoustic data. Multiple sessions with a subject are possible and replicable. For these reasons, this method may be of interest to phoneticians. The purpose of this note is to serve as an introduction to interpreting palatograms. Much in the same way that phonetics students learn to read spectrograms, reading palatograms is a skill which can be honed by practice and experience. and just as looking at spectrograms of an unknown utterance can develop increased sensitivity to acoustic facts, reading palatograms can enhance awareness of details of articulation.

The variety described here is Standard Hindi used in everyday casual speech by educated speakers in cities such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Delhi, etc. Although there are a few differences in pronunciation among speakers of these cities, the differences are minimal. The transcription is based on a recording of a female third generation speaker of Standard Hindi who grew up mostly in Uttar Pradesh before moving to Delhi. For a detailed analysis of Hindi segments see Dixit (1963) and Ohala (1983).

At the 1989 Kiel Convention of the IPA a sub-group was established to draw up recommendations for the transcription of disordered speech. The report produced at the Convention appeared in print in Duckworth, Hardcastle, Allen and Ball (1990), being mainly a list of symbols, termed ‘extensions to the IPA’, or ‘extIPA’ for short. Examples of the use of the extIPA symbols are given in Ball (1991), Howard (1993) and Ball, Code, Rahilly and Hazlett (1994) among others, and Ball (1993) includes them at textbook level. Various changes and additions to the original set of symbols are reported in Bernhardt and Ball (1993). These changes mean, however, there is a need for a listing of the current set of symbols, preferably in as concise a form as possible. There was also felt to be a need for the symbol set to receive overt recognition from a relevant society, therefore this publication marks the official adoption of the extIPA symbols by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA).

Tukang Besi is an archipelago in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where an Austronesian language is spoken. The speech represented here is that of the north-west coast of the island of Wanci. With mainly slight lexical variation it represents the speech of the two northernmost islands in the archipelago, Wanci and Kaledupa.