This paper describes the speech planning of the anthropomorphic talking robot WT-1R (Waseda Talker-No.1 Refined) for the production of consonant sounds. WT-1R has articulators (the tongue, lips, teeth, nasal cavity and soft palate) and vocal organs (the lungs and vocal cords), and can reproduce human vocal movement. Its total DOF (degrees of freedom) is 15. The vocal movement of WT-1R for vowel...

OBJECTIVE To describe the acquisition of /s/ and /r/ word-initial consonant clusters across 2 elicitation modalities. PATIENTS AND METHODS Seventy-four typically developing children aged 5-12 years produced 2- and 3-element /s/ and /r/ consonant clusters in word-initial position. Stimuli were presented pictorially and as written words in separate trials. RESULTS Overall, 94.5% of the conson...

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper address these two questions by reviewing relevant asp...

Koskenniemi’s two-level morphology was the first practical general model in the history of computational linguistics for the analysis of morphologically complex languages. In this article we will reconsider one of the key innovations in Koskenniemi (1983), namely the treatment of consonant gradation in finite state transducers. We will look not at Finnish, but at two languages with a more exten...

This chapter addresses harmony systems, a term which encompasses consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony. Harmony refers to phonological assimilation for harmonic feature(s) that may operate over a string of multiple segments. This can be construed in one of two ways. Two segments may interact “at a distance” across at least one (apparently) unaffected segment, as shown fo...

We examined the perception of Japanese consonant length contrasts (singleton vs geminate) in four groups of listeners: two groups of non-native learners of Japanese, three each at highly-advanced (NNJ1) and upper-intermediate (NNJ2) levels, native speakers of Italian (IT) (n=10) and Australian English (OZ) (n=8) with no knowledge of Japanese. Because Italian, like Japanese, uses consonant lengt...

The possible-word constraint (PWC; Norris, McQueen, Cutler, & Butterfield, 1997) has been proposed as a language-universal segmentation principle: Lexical candidates are disfavoured if the resulting segmentation of continuous speech leads to vowelless residues in the input-for example, single consonants. Three word-spotting experiments investigated segmentation in Slovak, a language with single...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded from 10 young adults with normal hearing using naturally produced speech contrasts. Consonant-place and vowel-height contrasts were examined in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables by pairing either the consonant /t/ or /p/ with the vowel /I/ or /E/. Vowel-height was also examined as a pseudovowel; one cycle of the vowel segment of a CV was extracted and rep...

This single-subject case study evaluates effects of treatment of a complex onset on the sound system of a monolingual Spanish-speaking child (female, aged 3;9) with phonological delay. Pre-treatment, the child excluded all consonant+liquid clusters, as well as tap /[symbol: see text]/ and trill /r/. Immediately following training on /f[symbol: see text]-/ in non-words, the child generalized acr...