The most widely accepted view of the syllable-internal architecture is the rightbranching onset plus rime structure with the subsequent division of the rime into the vocalic nucleus and the coda. However, this view has not been uncontested in grammatical descriptions, as various other interpretations including flat structures and non-rightbranching hierarchical descriptions have also been propo...

This study uses electropalatography to investigate the temporal and spatial organization of lingual consonants in English consonant clusters. Reduction differences between onsets and codas and between stops and fricatives are observed. Gestural overlap explains contact patterns in juncture geminates. INTRODUCTION AND METHOD The sequences considered are (1) juncture geminates—[d#d], [s#s], & [g#...

This is a study of tonal representation as a function of syllable structure constituency in Swedish. The results of a production experiment indicate that the onset of the focal accent rise – which we suggest to be best represented by a bitonal LH command – is associated with the consonant onset of the postaccented syllable. Furthermore, a vowel insertion is favored in certain intervocalic conso...

Children with hearing loss often have problems producing adult-like consonants. This study acoustically examined the speech of a monolingual Australian English speaking 5-yearold child with bilateral severe hearing loss who uses hearing aids. The aim was to explore whether there were any systematic errors in the child’s speech that may not be perceptually available to the listener. The analysis...

The duration of speech segments as a function of position in utterances (initial, roedial, final) was studicd. In the first cxpedment seven Engl/sh speakers read nonsense utterances of the form "say a [bab], say a [bgbab], say a [babgb]," etc. Spectragrams were used to determine the duration of speech segments in the readings. Final syllables were found to be longer than nonfinal syllables. F/h...

PURPOSE This study aimed to compare sound production errors arising due to phonological processing impairment with errors arising due to motor speech impairment. METHOD Two speakers with similar clinical profiles who produced similar consonant cluster simplification errors were examined using a repetition task. We compared both overall accuracy and acoustic details of hundreds of productions ...

The present investigation addresses the possible utility of sequential probabilities in the segmentation of spoken language. In a series of five word- spotting and two control lexical decision experiments, high- versus low-probability consonant-vowel (Experiments 1, 2, 5, and 7) and vowel-consonant (Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 6) strings were presented either in the nonsense contexts of target wor...

The voice onset time (VOT) of a stop consonant is the interval between its burst onset and voicing onset. Among a variety of research topics on VOT, one that has been studied for years is how VOTs are efficiently measured. Manual annotation is a feasible way, but it becomes a time-consuming task when the corpus size is large. This paper proposes an automatic VOT estimation method based on an on...

Speech requires programming the sequence of vocal gestures that produce the sounds of words. Here we explored the timing of this program by asking our participants to pronounce, as quickly as possible, a sequence of consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) structures appearing on screen. We measured the delay between visual presentation and voice onset. In the case of plosive consonants, produced by sha...

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others ...