The aim of this acoustic study is to analyse the phoneme [t] produced by school children surgically operated on for the cleft palate or cleft lip, in order to examine their vocal characteristics, to provide speech therapists with numerous concrete analyses of voice and speech, to effectively support them and to prevent some serious outcomes on their psychological and academic development. The motivation for this study was mainly stemming from the difficulties that Algerian schoolchildren with clefts encounter in the pronunciation of this phoneme. To carry out the study, several acoustic parameters were investigated in terms of the fundamental frequency F0, the first three formants F ₁, F ₂, and F ₃, the energy E ₀, the Voice Onset Time (VOT), the durations [CV] and [V] of the subsequent vowel [a]. For the analysis, further important parameters in the field of pathological speech were deployed, namely the degree of disturbance of F ₀ (jitter), the degree of disturbance of intensity (shimmer) and the HNR (Harmonics to Noise Ratio). Results revealed disturbance in the values of F ₁, F ₂, and F ₃ and stability in the values of F ₀. Another important reported aspect is the increase in the value of the VOT due to the difficulties in controlling the plosives’ successive closure and release.

The article aims at the explanation of some distributional peculiarities of two high unrounded vowels [i] and [È] in Russian. More generally, it looks at some phonotactic constraints of Russian vowels which are directly related to a broader topic of palatalization and vowel reduction in this language. Although the discussion in this paper concerns only a tiny section of Russian phonology, which is the distribution of high unrounded vowels, it is necessary to introduce several facts from Russian phonology, such as palatalization, velarization, stress and vowel reduction. They, at first sight, may look pretty much irrelevant to the main topic of the paper but, as it will become evident, are closely related and actually indispensable to the understanding of vowel distribution including the two high unrounded vowels in Russian.

The origin of Proto-Slavic palatal(ized) consonants has interested many linguists. Some of them have tried to connect palatality and velarity of Slavic consonants with the influence of Turkic consonant palatalization or velarization dependent on vowel harmony. This paper is a first study allowing for Turkological point of view and striving to show that there still are many doubts about the Proto- -Turkic influence on Proto-Slavic.