Vowel quality perception in quantity languages is considered to be unrelated to vowel duration since duration is used to realize quantity oppositions. To test the role of microdurational variations in vowel category perception in Estonian listening experiments with synthetic stimuli were carried out, involving five vowel pairs along the close-open axis. The results show that in the case of high...

The paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of final lengthening in Russian. The Corpus of Russian Professionally Read Speech (CORPRES) was used to investigate the degree of word and vowel lengthening as a function of prosodic factors, including prosodic boundary type and phrase or utterance pitch pattern. The results show that the degree of both word and vowel lengthening depends on...

This paper examines the status of language-specific systematic detail in the realisation of phonology and proposes the formalisation of this detail as a set of phonetic motifs. It is argued that such motifs form a key component of phonological (linguistic) knowledge and may shape the language-specific emergence of phonological structure, as illustrated by a case study of consonant gemination. I...

Classification is ubiquitous. The ability to recognize and categorize things based on their features is fundamental to human cognition; a large part of our ability to understand and deal with the world around us is a result of our ability to classify things. Similarly, we want to design systems that are capable of recognition and categorization. We want vending machines to be able to recognize ...

In Lab #7, we looked at designing low-order digital filters to model human vowel production. Why is this a useful technique? We argued that such models were useful for studying speech production and the like. However, there are more practical, applied reasons for doing this. Suppose that we want to perform speech recognition and determine which vowel is being said. A system would be hard presse...

This study is concerned with the perceptual relevance of regressive vowel harmony in French. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment showed that acoustic variations in a non-final vowel depending on the final vowel can be detected by listeners. The second experiment revealed that vowel harmony can facilitate the identification of the final vowel. Implications for current models of ...