Abstract This is a corpus study on closure duration and VOT in English voiceless stops in word-initial position. 19 speakers’ (10 female, 9 male) data from the Buckeye Speech corpus are used in the study. The first half of the paper introduces a novel approach of automatically finding the point of stop release in large speech database, using Mel spectral templates and similarity scores. The per...

This study examines the phenomenon of post-aspirated voiceless stops in Western Andalusian Spanish in /s/ + voiceless stop sequences. Previous analyses have proposed that the post-aspiration arises through a reorganization of the glottal spreading gesture for /s/ and the oral constriction gesture for the stop. This theory is tested by steadily increasing speakers' production rate, which has bee...

The category boundary on a voice-onset-time (VOT) continuum ranging from bin to pin shifts when the stimuli are preceded by different carrier phrases. By using a variety of precursor phrases, by varying the temporal interval between precursor and test word, and by selectively eliminating either voicing information or spectral structure from the precursors, the present experiments show that the ...

This study investigated the developmental patterns of variability in the speech parameter voice onset time (VOT) in 46 children. Five groups of children participated in the study as follows: (i) Group 1, aged 5 years 8 months (n=6); (ii) Group 2, 7 years 10 months (n=10); (iii) Group 3, 9 years 10 months (n=10); (iv) Group 4, 11 years 10 months (n=10); and (v) Group 5, 13 years 2 months (n=10)....

Based on the comparison between 4 esophageal speakers and 4 normal laryngeal speakers, this study investigated the voice onset time (VOT) characteristics and the linguopalatal articulation in the production of Mandarin obstruent consonants. Results show that esophageal speakers distinguish unaspirated vs. aspirated plosives or affricates in a similar way as laryngeal speakers do. However, the a...

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) contrasting shortand long-lag VOT; coronal stops in C...

Functional measurement was utilized to study the acoustic cues that contribute to the perception of the voicing difference in/zi/and/si/. Rather than simply varying the acoustic signal along a single dimension and observing the effect on perception, changes along two acoustic dimensions were covaried in a factorial manner. The time between the onset of the syllable and the onset of vocal-cord v...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Previous research found that individual talkers have consistent differences in the production of segments impacting the perception of their speech by others. Speakers also produce multiple acoustic-phonetic cues to phonological contrasts. Less is known about how multiple cues covary within a phonetic category and across talkers. We examined differences in individual talkers acro...

In several dialects of Japanese, including the Tokyoarea dialects that are the basis for the standard variety, there is an apparent change in progress that affects the pronunciation of word-initial /g, d, b/. Although young speakers today often produce these stops with short-lag voice onset time (VOT), the distribution of VOT values measured in productions by several generations of speakers in ...

Spoken word recognition shows gradient sensitivity to within-category voice onset time (VOT), as predicted by several current models of spoken word recognition, including TRACE (McClelland & Elman, Cognitive Psychology, 1986). It remains unclear, however, whether this sensitivity is short-lived or whether it persists over multiple syllables. VOT continua were synthesized for pairs of words like...