Brook (1) a. J6ox.ja.baa.nii b. reez.gaa.rii c. mu.sal.maan d. aas.maa.jaah e. aas.maan.jaah Syllable weight 49 ' talkative' 'small change' 'Muslim' ' highly placed' 'highly placed' (alternative pronunciation) In the absence of a superheavy syllable, the heaviest syllable attracts stress. In case of a tie, stress falls on the rightmost non-final heavy syllable: (2) a. kaa.n'i.ga.rii 'craftsmanship' b. roo.zaa.naa 'daily' c. ru.pi.aa 'rupee' d. ki.d h ar 'which way'

This study examines measures of glottal flow for vowels of Hmong, a Southeast Asian language which uses breathy and normal phonation contrastively. A software inverse filter was used to recover glottal airflow from oral airflow recordings. Properties of glottal flow measured in the time domain were glottal pulse symmetry and relative closed-phase duration. In the frequency domain, measures of spectral tilt and the amplitude difference between F0 and H2 were applied to discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) of the glottal flow waveforms. Spectral tilt could not be reliably measured for many tokens. For the other measures, values were available for all tokens and were compared across phonation types. Flow pulse symmetry is not significantly different for breathy and normal-voice vowels. On the other hand, prominence of the fundamental relative to the second harmonic is a very significant correlate of the breathy/normal distinction, as is the relative closed-phase duration. These results are considered in light of an existing model of the voice source.

A language’s use of the phonetic vowel space depends not only on how many vowel phonemes the language has, but on how each phoneme varies allophonically across contexts. This study tests the hypothesis that Japanese vowel allophones, measured from a wide range of contexts, will not fill the vowel formant space. This was predicted because Japanese has few vowel phonemes, distributed unevenly in the vowel space, and has no obvious processes of vowel reduction. Formant frequencies of vowel tokens from word lists and from read texts were compared for 7 speakers. These data show that, in Japanese, vowel allophones in prose fill in the vowel formant space more than allophones in word lists do, mainly as a result of centralization of the prose tokens. The use of the total formant space is determined in part by the distribution of phonemes, and in part by allophone centralization.

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