The main aim of this study was to investigate the articulatory mechanisms underlying incremental vowel shortening in German. Five speakers were recorded reading sentences with target words that contained either simplex (one consonant) or complex (two consonants) onsets and codas, respectively. Acoustic measurements showed that both onset and coda clusters induce vowel shortening. Two potential ...

This study is concerned with consonant clusters in two varieties of Portuguese, Brazilian (BP) and European (EP) and more specifically with whether the two varieties differ in the way that consonants are synchronized with each other. Two further aims were to test whether the synchronization was influenced by place of articulation and whether perceptual responses to a cluster were influenced by ...

This article examines the influence of phonetic and phonological factors and lexical frequency on accuracy and error types in the production of non-native phonotactics. In Experiment 1, English speakers were presented with non-native word-initial consonant clusters that were varied on several phonetic dimensions. Results showed that speakers are not equally accurate on the production of differe...

This year we continued our multisite collaboration aimed at improved understanding and modeling of how listeners handle noisy or corrupt speech. On the perception side, we have continued experiments on how listeners perceive distorted and incomplete speech tokens, including the use of our spondee/foil paradigm, in which listeners are played tokens derived from two-syllable compound words which ...

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet a...

This paper reports electroglottographic (EGG) data for consonant sequences composed of a word final stop or fricative followed by a voiced consonant produced by eight speakers of a Romance language, i.e., Catalan, where these clusters undergo regressive voicing assimilation. Analysis results reveal considerable speakerand consonant-dependent differences in the temporal period of vocal fold vibr...

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn po...

Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...

Vowel duration has been an issue in the study of Civili. Although minimal pairs based on vowel duration can be established at both perceptual and physical level, vowel lengthening still occurs in the context of voiced consonants in the language. A comparison between a measured physical duration and an experimentally perceived duration confirms the phonemic distinctiveness of vowel length and in...