Sound patterns of vowel harmony reduce articulatory effort which facilitates speech production with increased speech rate and accuracy. We argue that back harmony patterns reduce articulatory effort compared to height harmony and non-harmony patterns and harmony patterns formed from front unrounded (FU) vowels reduce articulatory effort compared to those of front rounded (FR)vowels. We report o...

We present a new feature-based method for estimating the speaking rate by detecting vowels in continuous speech. The features used are the modified loudness and the zerocrossing rate which are both calculated in the standard preprocessing unit of our speech recognition system. As vowels in general correspond to syllable nuclei, the feature-based vowel rate is comparable to an estimate of the le...

this study examined the phonetic characteristics of persian sentence stress produced by native mandarin chinese speakers. we compared the phonetic correlates of sentence stress, namely fundamental frequency (f0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the production of 8 mandarin chinese speakers and 8 native persian speakers. results indicated that mandarin chinese speakers of persian could di...

Speaking rate in general, and vowel duration more specifically, is thought to affect the dynamic structure of vowel formant tracks. To test this, a single, professional speaker read a long text at two different speaking rates, fast and normal. The present project investigated the extent to which the first and second formant tracks of eight Dutch vowels varied under the two different speaking ra...

Two studies explored the role of native language use of an acoustic cue, vowel duration, in both native and non-native contexts in order to test the hypothesis that non-native listeners' reliance on vowel duration instead of vowel quality to distinguish the English tense/lax vowel contrast could be explained by the role of duration as a cue in native phonological contrasts. In the first experim...

Across a variety of languages, phonation type and vocal-tract shape systematically covary in vowel production. Breathy phonation tends to accompany vowels produced with a raised tongue body and/or advanced tongue root. A potential explanation for this regularity, based on a hypothesized interaction between the acoustic effects of vocal-tract shape and phonation type, is evaluated. It is suggest...

in this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of russian loanword adaptation in persian, on the view of optimal theory (ot) (prince and smolensky, 1993, 2003). it is the first study of phonological process on russian loanwords adaptation in persian. by gathering about 50 current russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. we found out that vowel insertion, vowel prothesis...

The human ability to comprehend speech regardless of variation across speakers and accents has long puzzled researchers. Human listeners appear to employ separate mechanisms to cope with speaker versus accent variation. The present study uses event-related potentials (ERP) to test whether such different mechanisms exist at a preattentive level of speech processing. We assessed Australian Englis...

A new method was developed for accurately separating source and articulation filter characteristics of speech. This method is based on the AR-HMM modeling, where the residual waveform is expressed as the output sequence from an HMM. To realize an accurate analysis, a scheme of dividing HMM state was newly introduced. Using the AR-filter parameter values obtained through the analysis, we can con...

The question whether or not vowel quality can be maintained at F0 of the sounds exceeding statistical F1 of „normal“ speech is still a matter of debate. The present study investigates the perception of long Cantonese vowels /i, y, œ, a, ɔ, u/, spoken and sung in (C)V and (C)V:S context by a well-known female Cantonese Opera singer in the range of F0 of c. 560–860Hz. 172 high-pitched syllables o...