Literature on young infants’ discrimination abilities for fricative consonants is controversial. The voicing distinction between /s/ and /z/, a phonemic contrast present in Catalan but not in Spanish, was selected to analyze early discrimination capacities and the effect of language experience in Catalan monolingual, Spanish monolingual and Catalan-Spanish bilingual populations. By 4 months of ...

Conflict of interest: non-existent fricative consonants1-6. In normal morphological and/or functional conditions, these consonants are produced with partial constriction of the airway between the tongue apex and the alveolus, and they may be voiced (with vibration of vocal folds, [z]) or unvoiced (without vibration of vocal folds, [s]). Acoustically, voiced fricatives are characterized by the p...

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kinderga...

This study reports general and language-specific patterns in phoneme identification. In a series of phoneme monitoring experiments, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, English, and Polish listeners identified vowel, fricative, and stop consonant targets that are phonemic in all these languages, embedded in nonsense words. Fricatives were generally identified more slowly than vowels, while the sp...

In order to achieve better understanding of the articulatory-acoustic relationships, more data are still very much needed. The two-fold aim of the present study was thus (1) to provide a set of coherent midsagittal functions, area functions and formant frequencies, for a small corpus of vowels and fricative consonants produced by one subject, and (2) to derive a midsagittal profile to area func...

The following contribution addresses several issues concerning speech degrees of freedom in French oral vowels, stop, and fricative consonants based on an analysis of tongue and lip shapes extracted from cineradio- and labio-films. The midsagittal tongue shapes have been submitted to a linear decomposition where some of the loading factors were selected such as jaw and larynx position while fou...

PURPOSE To investigate the perceptual-auditory and orthographic performances of students regarding identification of contrasts among the fricatives of Brazilian Portuguese, and to investigate the extent to which these two types of performances are related. METHODS Data from perceptual-auditory and orthographic performances of 20 children attending the two first grades of elementary education ...

The role of fricative context on vowel recognition in a series of FV syllables being part of natural Spanish words is investigated. Perceptual tests were carried out to assess the recognition of vowels in fricative context, in two conditions: 1) Isolated vowel; 2) Fricative noise + vowel. Analysis of results show that adding the fricative noise improves the recognition of the vowel, while the a...

The study of Portuguese fricatives is a complex problem, which has not been explored fully. As part of a larger study of the acoustic properties of Portuguese fricatives, corpora of Portuguese words containing /f, v, s, z, A, O/, nonsense words with Portuguese phonology, and sustained Portuguese fricatives have been recorded and analysed. Results show that more than half of the voiced fricative...

Two series of Electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements indicated that average auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the disyllabic sound /asu/ were different between Japanese and English native listeners. Significant differences were observed in the time window where the P1-N1-P2 complex for /a/ is expected. This difference may be due to the absence/presence of the Auditory Change...