PURPOSE This study tested the hypothesis that individuals with vocal hyperfunction would show decreases in relative fundamental frequency (RFF) surrounding a voiceless consonant. METHOD This retrospective study of 2 clinical databases used speech samples from 15 control participants and women with hyperfunction-related voice disorders: 82 prior to treatment (muscle tension dysphonia, n=22; vo...

1. INTRODUCTION. * In some traditional models of the syllable, it is assumed that the syllable is composed of onset, nucleus and coda, where the onset consists of prevocalic consonants, the coda of any postvocalic consonants and the nucleus of a vowel, diphthong or syllabic consonant (see Van der Hulst & Smith 1982). Derwing et al. (1988) questioned the sharp boundaries between the subsyllabic ...

This paper addresses the on-going debate over the distinction between Agreement by Correspondence (Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004; a.o.) and the previously dominant theory of autosegmental feature spreading, focusing on a key conceptual difference between the two theories: the role of similarity as the basis of harmony patterns. It is argued that Agreement by Correspondence’s unique ability...

Auditory cortex (AC) lesions impair complex sound discrimination. However, a recent study demonstrated spared performance on an acoustic startle response test of speech discrimination following AC lesions (Floody et al., 2010). The current study reports the effects of AC lesions on two operant speech discrimination tasks. AC lesions caused a modest and quickly recovered impairment in the abilit...

Work by Tuller and Kelso [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 76, 1030-1036 (1984)] and Kelso et al. [J. Phon. 14, 29-59 (1986)] has demonstrated stable relations between jaw and lip movements in (bV#CVb) utterances across rate and stress conditions. Specifically, the onset of lip movement toward the intervocalic consonant was found to be constant with respect to the vowel-to-vowel jaw cycle in both time and r...

In the acquisition of a second language, numerous factors interact simultaneously, including the patterns of the first language (L1), the patterns of the target language (L2), universals of language acquisition, and the amount and type of exposure to the L2. English is learned as a second language in India, where the first languages of the English learners differ widely in the phonotactics of c...

Japanese speakers often face difficulty in producing complex syllable onsets in English and insert an extra vowel. We examined whether the vowel inserted by Japanese speakers was epenthetic (phonological) or excrescent (phonetic). The acoustic data suggested that an L1 phonological process was involved in vowel insertion by Japanese speakers with lower-level English competency, because the inse...

A series of listening tests with brief synthetic consonant-vowel syllables was carried out to determine whether the initial part of a syllable can provide cues to place of articulation for voiced stop consonants independent of the remainder of the syllable. The data show that stimuli as short as 10-20 ms sampled from the onset of a consonant-vowel syllable, can be reliably identified for conson...

This study examines a salient intrasyllabic phonological unit in Korean, the body-coda unit, its role in literacy skills in Korean, and a possible source of the salience of body-coda units in the spoken language. Data were collected from Korean-speaking, monolingual beginning readers (41 kindergarteners, 40 first graders). The results indicate that body-coda boundary (e.g., ca-t) is more salien...