In this work, we attempt to capture patterns of co-occurrence across vowel systems and at the same time figure out the nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this purpose we define a weighted network where the vowels are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read vowels) signify their co-occurrence likelihood over the vowel inventories. Through this network we ide...

The use of two markers of prosodic finality in French, vowel lengthening and high vowel breathiness/devoicing, were compared among statements and questions of various types (echo-questions, Wh-questions, questions with inverted subject and verb). The comparison focuses on the relation between sentence-final intonation and the other markers of finality. The intonation pattern of statements and W...

Phonological neighborhood density (ND) conditions variation in a number of acoustic phonetic properties of words. For example, previous research has shown greater hyperarticulation and greater nasal coarticulation in high-ND English words than in low-ND words. Here, we investigate the effects of ND on vowel hyperarticulation and vowel nasality (coarticulatory and contrastive) in French. Acousti...

Functional Phonology, which makes a principled distinction between articulatory and perceptual representations, features, and constraints, can describe as well as explain the symmetries as well as the gaps in inventories of vowels and consonants. Symmetries are the language-specific results of general human limitations on the acquisition of perceptual categorization and motor skills. Gaps are t...

This study aims to examine acoustic characteristics of English vowels produced by 1 Australian English talker and 3 Japanese learners of English in spontaneous speech. Primary stressed vowels in multi-syllabic words were extracted from five 15minute interview sessions. While there was a considerable overlap between different vowel categories both in native and nonnative vowel spaces, centroids ...

Cross-linguistically, vowel length contrasts may involve changes in vowel quality. In a different but more gradient way, speech style influences vowel articulation. While both alter vowel acoustics, it remains unclear whether both are byproducts of general processes of vowel undershoot or reflect a modification of articulatory gestures independent of durational constraints. This study investiga...