An abstract of the thesis of Jennifer Weber for the Master of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences presented June 7, 2007. Title: Voice Onset Time (VOT) Of Voiced and Voiceless Initial Stops and Initial /s/+Stop Consonant Clusters in Monolingual English-speaking Adults and 4-

The present study investigates non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g., geminate word palla "ball" vs singleton word pala "shovel"). This contrast is reportedly signaled by the duration of the singleton/geminate consonant and of the preceding vowel. Here, it is shown that the duration...

In Moroccan Arabic it is widely accepted that short vowels are mostly elided, resulting in consonant clusters and consonant geminates. In this paper we present evidence from our exploratory timing study that challenges this widely accepted principle. We work with minimal pairs of singleton consonants vs. geminates (e.g. /bka/ vs. /b kka/) that reveals a presence of a vowel insertion between the...

This paper addresses a question concerning phonological operations involved standard Farsi vowel Compensatory Lengthening (CL) due to glottal consonant deletion in syllabic coda. Specifically, I question two current views related to CL process. One view suggests that glottal allophonic weakening is compensated by vowel lengthening. Another view suggests that glottal consonant is deleted, but va...

In three experiments, we examined how readers learn and generalize new pronunciations for vowel graphemes. Children ages 6 1/2 to 9 (n = 97) and college students (n = 21) were taught a nonword that included a novel vowel pronunciation in the middle position (e.g., zuop is pronounced /zup/). They were then asked to pronounce other nonwords that contained the same vowel grapheme. Participants wer...

This paper investigates the prosodic conditioning of the segment production and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in the Standard Chinese through electropalatographic and acoustic analysis. The articulatory and acoustic measures were obtained for un-aspirated alveolar consonant /t/ and vowels /i/ and /a/. Results show that the domain-initial consonant is strengthened in a hierarchical manner in hig...

Current predictors of speech intelligibility are inadequate for understanding and predicting speech confusions caused by acoustic interference. We develop a model of auditory speech processing that includes a phenomenological representation of the action of the Medial Olivocochlear efferent pathway and that is capable of predicting consonant confusions made by normal hearing listeners in speech...

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Hall e & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare l...

The present study used the backward masking paradigm to investigate the nature and time course of phonological assembly. Two experiments were performed that tried to specify the extent to which phonological assembly is a serial process, or a process that gives special weight to consonants over vowels. Experiment 1 showed that recognition rates in a backward masking task varied as a function of ...