The somewhat misnamed breathy voiced vowels of Javanese have been retermed "slack voiced" by Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996). This paper extends the analysis of Javanese vowels to a wider range of vowels, describes in precise detail what the acoustic characteristics of Javanese slack voice are, and examines the acoustic characteristics of the "emphatic" voice quality often used in Javanese—the acoustic qualities of which are usually associated with what is more typically called breathy voice. I find that it is necessary to extend the range of voice qualities found in Javanese from stiff and slack to include the distinct breathy voice used for emphasis.

This study investigates the nature of the acoustic variation in sequences of identical affricates produced by Polish learners of English. In both English and Polish sequences of identical affricates occur across word boundaries, but only in Polish do such sequences also occur root internally and across morpheme boundaries. In Polish sequences of identical affricates are manifested variably both by rearticulation of both affricates and by articulation of a single affricate but with lengthened duration of either the stop or the fricative. To investigate their English, the subjects performed two tasks: repetition of 12 English sentences and orally responding to 17 multiple choice questions. The task produced significant cross-speaker differences in the phonetics of the geminates, differences correlated with differences in their proficiency levels in English. The more Polish-like singly articulated long affricates were produced by 22% of the intermediate speakers but by 48% of the advanced speakers, the opposite of what one might expect. The intermediate speakers appear to have paid more attention to the phonetics of the English cues, thus producing more fully rearticulated affricates; the more advanced speakers appear to have paid less attention to the phonetics of the cues, thus reverting more to the norms of Polish pronunciation.

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This study presents an acoustic analysis of Anong tones. It has three aims: (1) to present some detailed documentation of instrumental-acoustic data on citation tones, (2) to compare the acoustic features of the citation tones with the same tones used in disyllabic utterances, and (3) to analyze tones in disyllabic utterances. Anong citation tones are characterized by three features. First, the tonal space is small. Second, onset consonant type correlates with the pitch height of the following vowel. Third, non-modal phonation is not an acoustic cue to any of the five tones. Neither is it a contrastive property of vowels. In disyllabic utterances, the F0 shapes and heights on the first-syllable tones can be readily related to the F0 shapes and heights in the citation forms. The F0 value of the second-syllable tones depends on the offset value of the tone in the first syllable. However, disyllabic forms with the prefix /a31/ follow a different pattern, one in which the first-syllable tone is raised. This pattern correlates with vowel laryngealization and vowel duration.

The interaction of fundamental frequency (f0) and phonation types has been analyzed both in tonal languages in which phonation varies with tone [e.g., Jingpho (Maddieson and Ladefoged, 1985), Green Mong (Andruski and Ratliff, 2000), Jalapa Mazatec (Garellek and Keating, 2011), White Hmong (Esposito 2012)] and in tonal languages in which phonation is not contrastive. Patterns in the distribution of a non-contrastive phonation over tones have also been studied, for example in Mandarin (Keating and Esposito, 2007; Yu, 2010) and Cantonese (Yu, 2010). Previously unnoticed, however, is a phenomenon in which the same phonation type differentiates between two tones exclusively on the basis of differences not in its presence but in its distribution over the duration of the vowel. Here we explore an apparent case of this, investigating how f0 and laryngealization interact in Iu-Mien low tones and how this interaction is manifested across the vowel. The results show that low tones correlate with non-modal phonation. What is more, the study also shows that the distribution of laryngealization across the vowel length separates the low rise tone from the low rise-fall tone despite their pitch contours having been run together. This finding points to the development of contrastive phonation in Iu-Mien.

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