We present a new method for measuring the "darkness" of /l/, and use it to investigate the variation of English /l/ in a large speech corpus that is automatically aligned with phones predicted from an orthographic transcript. We found a correlation between the rime duration and /l/-darkness for syllable-final /l/, but no correlation between /l/ duration and darkness for syllable-initial /l/. Th...

This paper presents a study of tone classification for continuous Thai speech recognition. A modified autocorrelation algorithm was implemented with pitch detection, and the tone classifier utilized 3-layer feed-forward neural network with back-propagation. The best performance configuration of tone features was obtained with semi-tone scaling and mean-normalization producing a classification a...

The diachronic development of Afrikaans phonotactics is characterized by a considerable number of processes that affect consonant clusters, i.e. sequences of two or more consonants, especially when occurring in the word-final coda position (cf. Watermeyer 1996; Roberge 2002). For example, clusters were reduced in direk /dɪrək/ ('direct', Dutch direct) or nag /nɑx/ ('night', Dutch nacht). Nevert...

Since the times of the old Arab grammarians, the syllable has played a major role in the phonology of classical as well as colloquial Arabic. In the 1970s, phonologists investigated Cairene Arabic (CA) syllable structure and found it to be the domain of some phonological processes, such as emphatic spread, CVC syllables light word final but heavy word internally, limitations on consonant cluste...

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose labels differed by their initial consonant (Exp...

In this paper we describe acoustic characteristics of aspiration, explosiveness and tension of plosives within the framework of consonant sequences at boundaries of two words extracted from German read speech. In these sequences (66 types) the prejuncture consonants (in final position in the preceding word) were limited to the plosives p/t/k, whereas the post-juncture consonants (in initial pos...

The cross modal repetition priming paradigm was used to investigate how potential lexically ambiguous no-release variants are processed. In particular we focus on segmental regularities that affect the variant's frequency of occurrence (voicing of the critical segment) and phonological context in which the variant occurs (status of the following word-initial segment). Primes consisted of carrie...

A modification of the City University of New York nonsense syllable test (CUNY NST) has been developed in which (a) the several subtests of the original test are replaced with a 22-item consonant-vowel (CV) subtest and a 16-item vowel-consonant (VC) subtest; and, (b) the response choices for each target syllable include all 22 initial and all 16 final consonants, respectively. In addition, the ...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...