This study demonstrates some new aspects of preboundary lengthening and preaccentual shortening on a test word banana in American English. Preboundary lengthening was found to be extended to the initial unstressed syllable beyond the main-stressed syllable, presenting more complexity than has previously been assumed. Preaccentual shortening was observed regardless of boundary strength or the st...

Differences in gain (enhancement, in dB) required to optimize the consonant/vowel intensity ratio in nonsense syllables were determined for stops and fricatives, both voiced and voiceless, in 12 children with congenital moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss. The test stimuli were vowel/consonant nonsense syllables with various levels of enhancement ranging from 0 dB (for the unprocessed...

In this paper we analyze dialect phonetic data using Bayesian Monte Carlo Markov Chain inference (MCMC), in recent years one of the most powerful and the most successful methods in molecular phylogeny for inferring the relationships between species. This method enables us to infer the historic relationships between the language varieties, but also to explore historical accounts of the sound cor...

In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners ́ responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and...

Previous work on formant targets has assumed that these targets are independent of the speaking style. In this paper, we estimate consonant and vowel targets in a database of “clear” and “conversational” speech, using both style-independent and style-dependent models. The test-set errors and clustering of the estimated target values indicate that for this corpus, formant targets depend on the s...

The recent resurgence of interest in spatio-temporal neural network as speech recognition tool motivates the present investigation. In this paper an approach was developed based on temporal radial basis function “TRBF” looking to many advantages: few parameters, speed convergence and time invariance. This application aims to identify vowels taken from natural speech samples from the Timit corpu...

Many phonetic and phonological processes resemble one another, which has led some researchers to suggest that phonetics and phonology are essentially the same. This study compares phonetic and phonological processes of consonant lengthening by analyzing duration measurements collected from Hungarian speakers (n = 14). Affricates, which crucially possess a two-part structure, were placed in targ...

Multilingual speech recognition system is required for tasks that use several languages in one speech recognition application. In this paper, we propose an approach for multilingual speech recognition by spotting consonant-vowel (CV) units. The important features of spotting approach are that there is no need for automatic segmentation of speech and it is not necessary to use models for higher ...

This work addresses an important current issue in the field of second language speech acquisition. The main purpose of the experiments reported here has been to test a hypothesis about the influence of L1 phonology on the acquisition of contrastive L2 phonetic categories. This hypothesis holds that an L2 contrastive category will be difficult to acquire if it is based on a phonetic feature not ...

Two phoneme monitoring experiments examined the influence of Transitional Probability (TP) on phoneme recognition. Target phonemes appeared at the end of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) syllables, or as the first element of coda clusters in CVCC syllables. Reliable TP effects were found only for targets in CVCC syllables. The TPs both into and out of the targets influenced listeners' ability to...