In a production study, Bulgarian, English and German verses with regular poetic metrical metres of different types and elicited prose utterances with varied accentual patterns are produced in textual and iterative (dada) form and measured at syllable level according to the pairwise variability index (PVI) principle. Systematic differences in PVI values show that the measure is sensitive to metrical differences. But variations for utterances with the same metrical structure and comparable measures for accentually different utterances show the measure to be insensitive to the temporal distribution of accents. A perceptual experiment with Bulgarian, English and German subjects confirms the hypothesis that the perceived strength of rhythmicity in a line of verse is determined not only by its temporal structure, but also by other acoustic properties, most clearly by F₀ change within the metrical foot.

SUMMARYIn this study, a method for completely eliminating the presence of transverse shear locking in the application of the element-free Galerkin method (EFGM) to shear-deformable beams and plates is presented. The matching approximation ÿelds concept of Donning and Liu has shown that shear locking e ects may be prevented if the approximate rotation ÿelds are constructed with the innate ability to match the approximate slope (ÿrst derivative of displacement) ÿelds and is adopted. Implementation of the matching ÿelds concept requires the computation of the second derivative of the shape functions. Thus, the shape functions for displacement ÿelds, and therefore the moving least-squares (MLS) weight function, must be at least C 1 continuous. Additionally, the MLS weight functions must be chosen such that successive derivatives of the MLS shape function have the ability to exactly reproduce the functions from which they were derived. To satisfy these requirements, the quartic spline weight function possessing C 2 continuity is used in this study. To our knowledge, this work is the ÿrst attempt to address the root cause of shear locking phenomenon within the framework of the element-free Galerkin method. Several numerical examples conÿrm that bending analyses of thick and thin beams and plates, based on the matching approximation ÿelds concept, do not exhibit shear locking and provide a high degree of accuracy for both displacement and stress ÿelds.

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In the hope of provoking discussion, an attempt is made to combine articulatory, perceptual and acoustic considerations in relating the observed variants of R to one another. An underlying, and in itself debatable point of departure for the discussion is that is a universal non-lateral liquid from which all R variants ultimately stem.