Scottish Gaelic is an endangered language with very few fluent speakers under 60. Recordings were collected in the neighbourhood of Greater Bernera, Lewis, from 11 native speakers. Aerodynamic and palatographic data were collected from one 70-year-old male speaker. Palatographic data made in 1955 by Frederick Macaulay, a Gaelic speaker from South Uist, provided additional information. Analysis showed that all the stops were voiceless unaspirated or aspirated, with the aspirated stops being preaspirated intervocalically. Spectra of various consonants were also determined. Vowel analyses showed the nature of the 7 long and short vowels. Special attention was paid to the back unrounded vowels. Problems of syllabicity were examined and shown to affect pitch contours.

al synthetic two-vowel continua were constructed, each with a varying frequency parameter which crossed a critical distance in either of the 3bark difference dimensions. Critical distances over the 3-bark difference dimensions, estimated by phoneme boundaries calculated from vowel identification tests, will be compared with each other and with previous estimates. Some effects of duration on the phoneme boundary estimates of critical distance will also be discussed. [Work supported by NIH]. 1:47 SS2. A pereeptually based approach to F0 characterization. While researchers applying quantitative techniques to the characterization of intonation patterns [W. E. Cooper and J. M. Sorensen, Funda-mentalFrequency in Sentence Production (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1981)] have claimed success in relating phenomena such as F0 "resetting" to the presence of syntactic boundaries [J. Breckenridge and M. Y. Liberman, "The declination effect in perception," unpublished manuscript, Bell Laboratories (1977)], this procedure has been confined to a highly limited corpus of short, simple-declarative read sentences. The degree to which these models can be generalized to spontaneous speech has recently become the subject of controversy [N. Umeda, J. Phonet. 10, 279-290 (1982)]. We therefore examined a corpus of spontaneous and read speech with the intent of finding a quantitative characterization which could be applied across speaking conditions. To this end, we analyzed the data using the "topline" modeling procedure, as well as peak, valley, and allpoints rms lines, computed by linear regression. In simple-declarative clauses and sentences, the "topline" model performed adequately. The all-points rms line also performed well and captured the greater degree of variance occuring in spontaneous speech. Given this result, and for reasons of computational simplicity, we felt that an all-points rms line was superior in characterizing the data. This rms model is consistent with auditory processing models.

This paper describes the phonetic characteristics of Banawá, an endangered language spoken in Brazil. The qualities of the Banawá vowels are described in terms of their formant frequencies. The places of articulation of each consonant, the voice onset time and the manner of articulation are documented. The structure of syllables and words is delimited, and the location of stressed syllables is described and verified experimentally.

Ladefoged’s many different takes on phonetics, in many countries, will be described.