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Topic: Vowel reduction

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	REFLECTIONS ON ASPECTS OF VOWEL REDUCTION
		Most competence models of vowel reduction take mainly the role of word stress into account; vowels in syllables without primary or secondary word stress are reduced to schwa (usually under some extra restrictions with respect to, for instance, vowel type or the position of the vowel in the word).
		A vowel that is often subject to a strong acoustic reduction in a particular word may be confused with a schwa by listeners.
		Vowel reduction is in fact just one of many kinds of `impoverishment' that can occur in the acoustic speech signal.
	fonsg3.let.uva.nl /Proceedings/Proceedings18/Dick_van_Bergem/Dick_v_BergemProc18.html (7642 words)

	Tuesday June 1: John Harris (UCL)
		Vowel reduction degrades phonetic information in the speech signal and should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological representations.
		The point is illustrated by analyses of vowel reduction in a variety of languages drawn from Bantu, Romance and Slavic.
		Reduction follows two apparently contradictory routes in vowel space, yielding either centralised vowels (the 'centripetal' pattern) or the corner vowels [a, i, u] (the 'centrifugal' pattern).
	www.hum.uva.nl /actueel/object.cfm/objectID=A1388F7D-0E30-4EF7-A879DC17D002E34E (267 words)

	Vowel reduction and elision (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		In YorkTalk/IPOX, this is achieved not by deletion, but by compressing a syllable to such an extent that the vowel is "eclipsed" by the surrounding consonants (Coleman 1994:318ff).
		Syllable compression is also used to model apparent changes in vowel quality in a stem such as photograph when it appears in a latinate derivation.
		On the face of it, we would need to use different vowels, depending on the distribution of primary and secondary stresses.
	www.phon.ox.ac.uk /~jcoleman/IPOX_lectures/squish/squish.htm (485 words)

	RSRL WIP8 Coleman (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		vowel shift, diphthongization, vowel reduction and stress movement rules) is applied to map the invariant phonemic stem into three different phonetic forms: ['f@ut@,graf], [f@'togr@f@] and [,f@ut@'grafik].
		The temporal reduction in the vowel arises from the facts that a) the duration of the vowel is set to the duration of the entire syllable, and b) consonants are overlaid on vowels.
		The quality of vowels in compressed syllables differs from isolation forms because of the fact that the consonant-to-vowel and vowel-to-consonant formant frequency and bandwidth transitions, being part of the consonant, are relatively fixed in duration.
	www.rdg.ac.uk /slals/wip8/coleman.html (4418 words)

	As Vogais do Português e do Inglês - English & Portuguese Vowel Phonemes Compared (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Vowels are speech-sounds produced by a continuous flow of air and vibration of vocal cords.
		Therefore, achieving the correct vowel position is perhaps the most significant and persistent problem not only for learners of English as a foreign language that speak Portuguese or Spanish as a native language, but also for speakers of all languages that do not have as large a number of vowels in the spectrum as English.
		The number of vowels with phonemic significance, therefore, is a determining factor in the degree of difficulty to attain oral proficiency and a good pronunciation.
	www.sk.com.br /sk-voga.html (2834 words)

	Vowel reduction and the perception of words (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		For type of vowel, lower word rates where found for words with the vowels /a/ and /o/, whereas words with nasals after the reduced vowel tended to result in higher word rates.
		A suitable manipulation is to remove the vowel in the pre-stress syllable, since in Swedish, a vowel in this position often is deleted or reduced in spontaneous speech.
		For the vowels, the average word judgement rate is lower for stimuli where the deleted vowels are /a/ (46%) and /o/ (45,1%) than for the other vowels (58,5% - 60,6%).
	www.ling.lu.se /persons/JohanF/papers/fon98.html (1830 words)

	SSPR-03 Abstract: Swerts et al. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Vowel reduction is studied in a corpus of spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch, produced by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch.
		Three main types of vowel reduction were distinguished: reduction to schwa (e.g.
		Reduction to schwa and complete reduction only occurred in the Netherlands.
	www.isca-speech.org /archive/sspr2003/sspr_mao4.html (201 words)

	Vowels
		Unlike English the five basic vowels in Esperanto are not diphthongs, and it is very important for English speakers to strive to avoid tongue movement and to produce pure vowels.
		In the production of tense vowels, the muscles of the mouth are relatively tense; in the production of the corresponding lax vowel, they are relaxed and the tongue tends to move slightly toward the center of the mouth.
		However, both the tense vowel /e/ and the lax vowel /ɛ/ of 'bet' occur in the speech of many speakers of Esperanto, and the distribution probably depends on the distribution in the native language of the speaker.
	www.owlnet.rice.edu /~wies301/Vowels.html (1300 words)

	Vowel duration
		Although the acquisition of contrastive vowel quantity has not received much empirical attention, it appears to be quite challenging unless their native language employs an analogous property.
		The Grabe metric is based on the insight that stressed and unstressed vowels in languages employing stress rhythm vary widely in duration, whereas the durations of vowels in syllable rhythm languages vary less.
		It is calculated from the absolute value of differences in vowel duration between successive syllables divided by the average duration of the pair.
	oak.cats.ohiou.edu /%7Ebond/ICPhS.html (1690 words)

	Iraq Museum International Open Encyclopedia: Aramaic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The modern standard of vowel pointing for the Hebrew Bible, the Tiberian system (tenth century), was most probably based on the pronunciation of the Galilean dialect of Jewish Middle Palestinian.
		The cardinal open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel ('short' a, like the first vowel in the English 'batter', IPA: /a/).
		In the wake of vowel changes, the distinction eventually became phonemic; still later, it was often lost in certain dialects.
	www.baghdadmuseum.org /ref/index.php?title=Aramaic (5484 words)

	Publications
		A spectrographic study of allophonic variation and vowel reduction in West Greenlandic Eskimo.
		The gestural organization of vowels: a cinefluorographic study of articulator gestures in Greenlandic, poster presented at the Third Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Societies of America and Japan, December 1996 at Honolulu.
		The gestural organization of vowels and consonants: a cineradiographic study of articulator gestures in Greenlandic.
	www.ling.lu.se /persons/Sidney/pubs (914 words)

	Tundra Nenets grammatical sketch
		The vowel sequences are invariably over-long or long vowels, with the possibility of two syllable peaks in their pronunciation.
		The distribution of non-initial stretched vowels is not entirely clear: in the present description, non-initial æ is restricted to the essive -ngæ, and the high stretched vowels do not appear in non-initial syllables at all, with the possible exception of dialectal accusative plural forms.
		The basic stem types are (i) the vowel stems, (ii) the glide stems, (iii) the alteration stems, and (iv) the consonant stems, the major divisions being the vowel and the consonant stems.
	www.helsinki.fi /~tasalmin/sketch.html (9942 words)

	Kira Ogorodnikova (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		This experimental study of the acquisition of Russian vowel reduction by American adult learners examines the influence of Russian orthography on the reduction pattern.
		Interlanguage (IL) data is compared with the data on vowel reduction in spontaneous speech, both in the standard dialect of Russian and in the Perm dialect, which allows the spelling induced reduction.
		In addition to L2 orthography, the pattern of non-target reduction in IL was influenced by L1 transfer of the reduction rules, the rates of the neutral schwa being in complementary distribution to the spelling induced productions.
	aatseel.org /dissertations/langteach/ogorodnikovak.html (321 words)

	First Year Russian
		The second is that stress effects the pronunciation of vowels, a fact which can make a small mistake render a word incomprehensible to a Russian.
		All stressed vowels will be pronounced as marked on our alphabet chart or азбука (from the names for the first two letters of the Old Russian alphabet, азъ and букы - much like alphabet is from the Greek alpha and beta).
		Vowels reduce to one of three sounds depending on their position in the word, and whether they are a front or back vowel (see previous page).
	babel.uoregon.edu /Russian/alphabet/stress.html (663 words)

	'Yemls Phonology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The regular phonetic processes applying to vowels are diphthongization, vowel assimilation, and vowel reduction.
		Phonetically, the vowel of a V syllable combines with that of the preceding syllable to produce a diphthong note that this definition of diphthong includes phonetically long vowels.
		None of these reductions can occur if the syllable is stressed, is followed by a V syllable, or follows a non-initial V syllable, and adjacent reduced syllables also can't occur.
	home.earthlink.net /~jeffsjones/conlang/Yemls/Phonol.htm (1413 words)

	Acoustic Vowel Reduction As A Function Of Sentence Accent, Word Stress, And Word Class - van Bergem (ResearchIndex)
		In formant synthesis, researchers have speci ed rules to mimic vowel reduction, for example by manipulating formant targets or...
		The area was largest with slow stressed vowels and smallest with fast unstressed vowels.
		4 An acoustic and articulatory study of vowel reduction in fou..
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /vanbergem93acoustic.html (972 words)

	Russian language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		This reduction is weakest in the syllable immediately before the one stressed.
		Slight drawling of stressed vowels and slurred leveling of the unstressed vowels to an /a/ ("akanye" аканье), a schwa /@/, or a iotated schwa /j@/ or /'@/.
		The loss of the nasal vowels (the yuses of ancient Cyrillic), which had themselves developed from Indo-European [-en-]/[-an-]/[-on-] before a consonant—usually dental or labial—and at word boundaries.
	www.sciencedaily.com /encyclopedia/russian_language (6003 words)

	Schwa in Phonological Theory
		Reduction to schwa is well-known from the study of Germanic languages.
		Schwa is the unmarked vowel and Alderete assumes that there is a constraint which requires all vowels in the word to be unmarked (I will call this constraint TurnSchwa for the sake of simplicity, but it can of course be seen as an instance of the general constraint *Structure).
		A projection constraint relating the quality of the vowel to the rhyme structure of the syllable in which that vowel occurs is therefore to be preferred.
	www.vanoostendorp.nl /fonologie/schwaip.htm (6180 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		At issue is the role of phonetic vowel duration in the representation of VR in the phonological grammar.
		Recent analyses differ in the precise mechanisms by which they derive these two degrees of reduction, but what all accounts share is their assignment of both degrees of VR to the phonological component of the grammar.
		This underappreciated distinction between gradient and categorical systems of vowel reduction is explored in light of the cross-linguistic typology of vowel reduction systems, and is argued, together with a theory of phonologization, to obviate the need for functional grounding or phonetic motivation for the set of constraints responsible for generating attested phonological systems.
	www.umass.edu /linguist/about/whisc/whisc-2004-4-22/barnes.txt (354 words)

	Jaye Padgett's Research
		Russian exhibits a rich pattern of phonological vowel reduction, by which some vowel contrasts are neutralized in unstressed syllables.
		We are particularly interested in whether contraction of the vowel space in unstressed positions is primarily due to raising, and in whether contrasting pairs of vowels are evenly spaced within and across contexts.
		In languages that contrast oral and nasalized vowels, the inventory of nasalized vowels is always equal to or smaller than that of oral vowels.
	people.ucsc.edu /~padgett/papers.html (1781 words)

	Citations: Spectrographic study of vowel reduction - Lindblom (ResearchIndex) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		On the basis of acoustic evidence of vowel reduction he proposed that articulatory and acoustic undershoot of vowels is a function of reduction of movement towards the vowel target due to physiological limitations.
		Indeed neutralizing phonological reduction is typically accompanied by phonetic reduction.
		in a spectrographic study of vowel reduction (see [4] for references to other studies on locus equations) It was subsequently suggested by Krull [5, 6] that the slope value derived from locus equations could be used to infer the degree of coarticulation between a consonant and its adjacent.
	citeseer.lcs.mit.edu /context/115539/0 (2330 words)

	On The Perception Of Acoustic And Lexical Vowel Reduction (ResearchIndex)
		It was found that listeners disagree in many cases on the assignment of a vowel to either of these categories.
		This suggests that listeners cannot properly distinguish between acoustic reduction (the loss of spectral quality of a full vowel) and lexical reduction (the substitution of a full vowel with a schwa).
		7 Acoustic vowel reduction as a function of sentence accent, w..
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /vanbergem93perception.html (322 words)

	ICSLP'98 Abstract: Frid, Johan (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The effects of the identity of the removed vowel and of features of the consonants adjacent to the removed vowel were then examined, as well as syllabic features.
		For type of vowel, lower word rates were found for words with the vowels /a/ and /o/, whereas words with nasals after the reduced vowel tended to result in higher word rates.
		Furthermore, words that still conformed to the phonotactic structure of Swedish after reduction got lower word rates than words that violated this, possibly because the conforming words are more eligible to resyllabification, which renders them as phonotactically legal nonsense words rather than real words.
	www.isca-speech.org /archive/icslp_1998/i98_0743.html (187 words)

	Reduction to schwa
		Vowel reduction in Germanic, a cross-linguistic overview of the facts; reduction as feature loss; reduction and halfway-reduction in Russian; problems and advantages of an account in terms of faithfulness to the head for Dutch.
		Reduction of V is generally inhibited, because C requires vocalic support (not provided by X): adirond[ae]ck, adjectival.
		Reduction of V is forced (plus or minus idiosyncracies) by ''constant transition,'' when the preceding stressed syllable is light (``Arab rule''): hamm[@]ck, rec[@]gnition.
	www.vanoostendorp.nl /fonologie/schwa/wednesday.html (766 words)

	Vowel reduction in Bulgarian
		Reduction follows two apparently contradictory routes in vowel space, yielding either centralised values (the ‘centripetal’ pattern) or the corner values a, i, u (the ‘centrifugal’ pattern).
		What unifies these vowels is the relative simplicity of their acoustic spectra compared to those of mid peripheral vowels.
		Representing vowels in terms of three basic components manifested as a, i and u allows informational asymmetries of this sort are to be directly recorded in phonological grammars.
	blogger.xs4all.nl /fonolog/archive/2004/09/28/9601.aspx (436 words)

	Vowel Reduction of /a/ to /e/ in final word position (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Vowel Reduction of /a/ to /e/ in final word position
		When Noreen was observed talking, she used many of these words as they are common in speech, and she unconsciously, as the writer expected, played her words by the vowel reduction rule of /
		"The vowel reduction process is very characteristic of the Johor-Riau Malay dialect of which the standard [Malaysian Malay] dialect is based (Teoh 49)."
	mahdzan.com /fairy/papers/indo-malay/indo-paper4.shtml (151 words)

	Topics in Phonetics
		One of the definitions of the vowel specifies that it is the "nucleus of the syllable." That means that a vowel is the one essential element of the syllable.
		But we just said that the vowel is the nucleus of every syllable; so a vowel has to be present in some form.
		One way of understanding this is to imagine that a vowel has been reduced past the point of being a "schwa" to where it has no independent identity at all.
	www.cola.wright.edu /Dept/ENG/limouze/PHONISS.HTM (539 words)

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