This study aimed to assess the relative importance of biomechanical and linguistic constraints on articulatory precision by analyzing contextual and token-to-token variability in tongue postioning for vowels. Contextual variability proved greater for lax vowels. Back vowels showed substantially increasing variability towards more front tongue locations. Regarding token-totoken variability, lax ...

Certain dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) show signs of nasal coda restoration (NCR). Results of an instrumental study suggest that stressed, word-final nasal vowels terminate in a velar nasal stop, though word-final nasal stops are presumed to be banned in BP. Four BP speakers uttered words ending in a stressed nasal vowel. A split flow mask sampled nasal and oral airflow. Complete oral oc...

Languages differ in the constitution of their phonemic repertoire and in the relative distinctiveness of phonemes within the repertoire. In the present study, we asked whether such differences constrain spoken-word recognition, via two word reconstruction experiments, in which listeners turned non-words into real words by changing single sounds. The experiments were carried out in Dutch (which ...

Successful speech perception in real-world environments requires that the auditory system segregate competing voices that overlap in frequency and time into separate streams. Vowels are major constituents of speech and are comprised of frequencies (harmonics) that are integer multiples of a common fundamental frequency (F0). The pitch and identity of a vowel are determined by its F0 and spectra...

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...

Past studies have shown that speakers spontaneously adjust their speech acoustics in response to their auditory feedback perturbed in real time. In the case of formant perturbation, the majority of studies have examined speaker's compensatory production using the English vowel /ɛ/ as in the word "head." Consistent behavioral observations have been reported, and there is lively discussion as to ...

The relationship between vowel nasalization and vowel quality has been examined in many studies, yet results are conflicting. This study examined nasal vowels in Pwo language. The result showed that low nasal vowels had more nasalization than mid nasal vowels. A high correlation between nasalization and vowel duration was also found. Additionally, percentages of the total nasal duration were ro...