Although Canada has two official languages, French and English, it is well-known that these languages are not used equally across the country. Quebec is French-dominant, with nearly 8 out of 10 people reporting French as their native language compared to 8.3% who are native Anglophones (Statistics Canada, 2012b). In Alberta, English is the mother tongue of 77.0% of residents, with native Franco...

We describe a discriminative algorithm for automatic VOT measurement, considered as an application of predicting structured output from speech. In contrast to previous studies which use customized rules, in our approach a function is trained on manually labeled examples, using an online algorithm to predict the burst and voicing onsets (and hence VOT). The feature set used is customized for det...

In this study, we aimed to determine the average VOT (voice onset time) values of the Turkish stop consonants by using 30 volunteers (15 female and 15 male). For this aim, we measured the VOT values of the six Turkish stops (i.e., /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/), which were uttered by 30 subjects in three times, on wideband spectrograms. At the result of this study, the average VOT values of /...

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial stops in English (e.g., "beach" and "peach"). Partic...

A significant body of experimental and naturalistic studies has demonstrated that bilingual speakers of Romance language–English pairings are capable of creating separate phonetic categories for the production of voiceless stops, measured as voiced onset time (VOT), across their languages (Caramazza, Yeni-Komshian, Zurif & Carbone, 1973; Flege & Eefting, 1987: Major, 1992, interalia). However, ...

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant–stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, small degree VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second compared productions (L2) English across two levels proficiency, speak...

This paper focuses on an early instance of the concept of voice onset time (VOT) which is traditionally associated with the work of Leigh Lisker and Arthur Abramson in the 1960s. Evidence is presented here that the idea behind VOT – if not the name – is much older than commonly thought. A publication of an Armenian scientist who worked at the Abbé Rousselot's experimental phonetics laboratory a...

A model is presented for analyzing Pareto-efficient build-operate-transfer toll road contracts. The formulation simultaneously allows maximizing social welfare and private profit when road users vary in their value-of-time (VOT). The failure rate and mean residual functions of the VOT distribution are used to characterize Pareto-efficient solutions. Service quality, measured in terms of the vol...

Voice onset time (VOT) data for the plosives /p b t d k g/ in two vowel contexts (/i a/) for 5 groups of 46 boys and girls aged 5; 8 (5 years, 8 months) to 13;2 years were investigated to examine patterns of sex differences. Results indicated that there was some evidence of females displaying longer VOT values than the males. In addition, these were found to be most marked for the data of the 1...

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of speaking rate changes on the perception of English stop consonants by four groups of subjects: English and Spanish monolinguals, 'early' Spanish/English bilinguals who learned English in childhood, and 'late' bilinguals who learned English in adulthood. Subjects identified, and then later rated for goodness as exemplars of the English /p/ catego...