Abstract
Through assimilation and other phonetic processes, a language may have more segments on the phonetic surface than in lexical representation. Consider English vowels: nasalized, long, front rounded, and central vowels are all introduced in derivations. Conceivably, then, languages could be much more similar phonetically than phonemically; possibly they could even fill the phonetic space equally. In that case, languages with fewer phonemes would have to show much more phonetic variation per phoneme, compared to languages with many phonemes. The alternative situation would be that languages with fewer phonemes would leave parts of the phonetic space unused. We are testing these possibilities by comparing the F1‐F2‐F3 space for vowel allophones in different languages. Here we report on two five‐vowel languages, Japanese and Russian. Seven speakers of each language read word lists and free text, and vowel formants are compared across conditions and languages. Preliminary results indicate that Japanese, the language expected to show the least variation, has widely separated vowels in word lists, but fills up the phonetic space in prose. [Work supported by USPHS grant NS 18163‐02 to Peter Ladefoged.]
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