As a preliminary step towards conducting a teacher survey on pronunciation teaching in order to design a phonetics course for current and prospective English teachers in Japan, this paper analyses six governmentapproved English textbooks used in junior high schools. The purposes are to examine the types of pronunciation activities in the textbooks and to discuss the knowledge of phonetics requi...

Speech is imperative for human communication. Therefore, phonetics must be considered , along with mechanics and esthetics as the integral factors in contributing to the success of a dental prothesis . Palatal rugae contours have a very important role in phonetics, by production of linguopalatal sounds that involves the contact between tongue and palate. By customizing palatal contours of a max...

We present a novel method for recovering articulator movements from speech acoustics based on a constrained form [9] of a hidden Markov model. The model attempts to explain sequences of high dimensional data using smooth and slow trajectories in a latent variable space. The key insight is that this continuity constraint when applied to speech helps to solve the \ill-posed" problem of acoustic t...

PROMPT (Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) is a treatment approach that is widely used to improve sound production in children with speech impairments. This approach uses tactile cues to support and shape movements of the oral articulators in order to improve the production of individual sounds, syllables, words, and eventually connected speech. The underlying assumption ...

We present a statistical technique for identifying critical, dependent and redundant roles played by the articulators during production of English phonemes using articulatory (EMA) data. It identifies a list of critical articulators for each phone based on changes in the distribution of articulator positions. The effect of critical articulation on dependent articulators is derived from inter-ar...

The purpose of this investigation was to study sagittal condylar inclination values within a uniform sample (Angle class I occlusion) using 'articulator-related registration' and Camper's plane as a reference plane. The study was performed on a sample of 58 Angle class I subjects (mean age 25.1, SD 3.1). Measurements were performed with an ultrasonic jaw tracking device with six degrees of free...

Mandarin has been added to the list of second additional languages (SAL) that South African learners can choose from. The researchers proactively conducted research pertaining SAL (Mandarin) since it is a dynamic phenomenon in Africa. question was formulated as follows: Do factors such 1) phonemic differences between learners’ mother tongue and Chinese, 2) cognitive styles 3) abilities singing ...

This paper traces some of the history of the development of a model for speech perception in which words are assumed to be represented as sequences of bundles of binary distinctive features. In the model, probability estimates for feature values are derived from measurements of acoustic attributes in the vicinity of acoustic “landmarks.” Landmarks are detected based on amplitude changes in vari...