Among the world's languages, syllable inventories allowing only initial consonants predominate over those allowing both initial and final consonants. Final consonants may be disfavored because they are less easy to identify and/or more difficult to produce than initial consonants. In this study, two perceptual confusion experiments were conducted in which subjects identified naturally produced consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in different frame sentences. Results indicated that initial consonants were significantly more identifiable than final consonants across all conditions. Acoustic analyses of the test syllables indicated that the relative identifiability of initial and final consonants might be explained in terms of production differences as indicated by the greater acoustic distinctiveness of initial consonants.

The current study focused on the production of non-contrastive geminates across different boundary types in English to investigate the hypothesis that word-internal heteromorphemic geminates may differ from those that arise across a word boundary. In this study, word-internal geminates arising from affixation, and described as either assimilated or concatenated, were matched to heteromorphemic geminates arising from sequences of identical consonants that spanned a word boundary and to word-internal singletons. Word-internal geminates were found to be longer than matched singletons in absolute and relative terms. By contrast, heteromorphemic geminates that occurred at word boundaries were only longer than matched singletons in absolute terms. In addition, heteromorphemic geminates in two word phrases were typically “pulled apart” in careful speech; that is, speakers marked the boundaries between free morphemes with pitch changes and pauses. Morpheme boundaries in words with bound affixes were very rarely highlighted in this way. These results are taken to indicate that most word-internal heteromorphemic geminates are represented as a single long consonant in the speech plan rather than as a consonant sequence. Only those geminates that arise in two word phrases exhibit phonetic characteristics that are fully consistent with the representation of two identical consonants crossing a morpheme boundary.

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The goals of the current study were (1) to assess differences in child and adult pausing, and (2) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from ten 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of pause frequency, duration, variation in durations, and pause location indicated that pause time decreased with retelling, but not with age group except when child and adult pausing was considered in its speech and language context. The results suggest that differences in child and adult pausing reflect differences in child and adult language, not in the cognitive resources allocated to language production

This study explored whether the sound structure of Indian English (IE) varies with the divergent native languages of its speakers or whether it is similar regardless of speakers' native languages. Native Hindi (Indo-Aryan) and Telugu (Dravidian) speakers produced comparable phrases in IE and in their native languages. Naïve and experienced IE listeners were then asked to judge whether different sentences had been spoken by speakers with the same or different native language backgrounds. The findings were an interaction between listener experience and speaker background such that only experienced listeners appropriately distinguished IE sentences produced by speakers with different native language backgrounds. Naïve listeners were nonetheless very good at distinguishing between Hindi and Telugu phrases. Acoustic measurements on monophthongal vowels, select obstruent consonants, and suprasegmental temporal patterns all differentiated between Hindi and Telugu, but only 3 of the measures distinguished between IE produced by speakers of the different native languages. The overall results are largely consistent with the idea that IE has a target phonology that is distinct from the phonology of native Indian languages. The subtle L1 effects on IE may reflect either the incomplete acquisition of the target phonology or, more plausibly, the influence of sociolinguistic factors on the use and evolution of IE.