A Behavioural Correlate of Phonological Structure

Daniel Nettle*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Data from a cross-cultural study of conversational behaviour were compared with the phonological inventories of the languages being spoken. There was a highly significant inverse relationship between the number of contrastive vowels and the average volume of native speakers' voices. It seems that different languages are not equally salient perceptually.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)425-429
Number of pages5
JournalLanguage and Speech
Volume37
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 1994
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • phonological structure
  • speech volume

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