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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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Indigenous Australian languages typically have small vowel inventories. In this paper we investigate the effects of prosodic structure in highlighting paradigmatic contrasts among vowels in three languages: Kayardild, Dalabon, and Mayali (Bininj Gun-wok). Our results suggest that all three languages illustrate the principal of sufficient rather than maximal dispersion. However in some cases, vowel targets are sharpened in phrase-final position, suggesting that this is a prosodically prominent position in these languages.
Bibliographic reference. Fletcher, Janet / Butcher, Andrew (2003): "Local and global influences on vowel formants in three Australian languages", In ICPhS-15, 905-908.