Although speech articulation relies heavily on the sensorimotor processing, little is known about its brain control mechanisms. Here, we investigate, using transcranial magnetic stimulation, whether the motor cortex contributes to the generation of quick sensorimotor responses involved in speech motor coordination. By applying a jaw-lowering perturbation, we induced a reflexive compensatory upp...

Our paper addresses the question of covariation between intraoral air pressure and size of contact area between tongue and palate during the articulation of the Norwegian stop consonants /t/ and /d/. An EPG investigation of the two plosives shows a larger contact area between tongue and palate for /t/ than for /d/. An investigation of intraoral air pressure during the articulation of the two pl...

When discriminating pairs of speech stimuli from an acoustic voice onset time (VOT) continuum (for example, one ranging from /ba/ to /pa/), English-speaking subjects show a characteristic performance peak in the region of the phonemic category boundary. We demonstrate that this "category boundary effect" is reduced or eliminated when the stimuli are preceded by /s/. This suppression does not se...

This paper presents jaw movement data for the coronal consonants of Central Arrernte. It compares jaw movement for stops with jaw movement for nasals and laterals, across dental, alveolar, retroflex and alveo-palatal places of articulation. Results suggest that when there is a clear spectral peak for the release burst, as is the case primarily for the palatal, but also for the alveolar and retr...

The present research investigates the aerodynamic features of French fricative consonants using direct measurement of subglottal air pressure by tracheal puncture (Ps) synchronized with intraoral air pressure (Po), oral airflow (Oaf) and acoustic measurements. Data were collected from four Belgian French speakers’ productions of CVCV pseudowords including voiceless and voiced fricatives [f, v, ...

In this paper, the acoustic correlates of the labial and alveolar place of articulation for both plosive and fricative consonants are investigated, and the results are analyzed in terms of vowel context, voicing and manner of articulation. Several measurements, including formant and noise measurements, are reported for CVs spoken by two male and two female talkers. It was found that the spectra...

The aerodynamic and acoustic phenomena involved in the production of fricative consonants are far from being completely understood. The overall Ievel and spectral characteristics of the radiated sound pressure are known to primarily depend on the aerodynamic state of the vocal tract, i.e. the pseudo-static pressure drop across the main oral constriction and the cross-sectional area of the const...

Past studies have shown evidence of important speakerspecific content in the higher frequencies of the spectrum, which are filtered out by narrowband channels. Besides, wideband transmissions, which are gaining ground over narrowband communications, offer an extended range of frequencies which account not only for better speech quality and intelligibility, but also for an improved speaker recog...

A new articulatory synthesizer (SAPWindows), with a modular and flexible design, is described. A comprehensive acoustic model and a new interactive glottal source were implemented. Perceptual tests and simulations made possible by the synthesizer contributed to deepen our knowledge of one of the most important characteristics of European Portuguese, the nasal vowels. First attempts at incorpora...

To clarify the acoustic features that distinguish the alveolo-palatal affricates [t] from the alveolar affricate [ts] or the alveolar fricative [s], Japanese words with these consonants, pronounced by single and multiple native speakers of Japanese, were analyzed with a one-third octave bandpass filter. In the frequency range of 2500–4000 Hz, [t] had much higher intensity than [ts] or [s]. In...