This study examined the discrimination of word-final stop contrasts (/p/-/t/, /p/-/k/, /t/-/k/) in English and Thai by three groups of listeners differing in their first language (L1): Australian English (AE), Japanese (NJ) and Thai (NT). Thai final stops are invariably unreleased whereas English final stops are variably released. Although Japanese listeners had no experience with word-final st...

Background. Transportation settings such as bus stops and train station platforms are increasingly the target for new smokefree legislation. Relevant issues include secondhand smoke exposure, nuisance, litter, fire risks and the normalization of smoking. We therefore aimed to pilot study aspects of smoking behavior and butt disposal at bus stops. Methods. Systematic observation of smoking and b...

Voicing contrasts in stop consonants are expressed by a constellation of acoustic cues. This study focused on a spectral cue present at burst onset in American English labial and coronal stops. Spectral shape was examined for word-initial, prevocalic stops of all three places of articulation in a laboratory production study and a large corpus of continuous read speech. Voiceless labial and coro...

Pointcuts in aspect-oriented languages can be seen as predicates over events in the computation of a program. The ability to express temporal relations between such events is a key feature towards more expressive pointcut languages. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a pointcut language within which pointcuts are predicates over the complete execution trace of the progr...

The random initialization of weights of a multilayer perceptron makes it possible to model its training process as a Las Vegas algorithm, i.e. a randomized algorithm which stops when some required training error is obtained, and whose execution time is a random variable. This modelling is used to perform a case study on a well-known pattern recognition benchmark: the UCI Thyroid Disease Databas...

In the present study, brain activations were measured using positron emission tomography (PET) over the course of practice. Fourteen right-handed participants were scanned during six 1-min periods of practice tracing a cut-out maze design with their eyes closed. Practice-related decreases were found in the right premotor and posterior parietal cortex and left cerebellum, increases in the supple...

This study evaluates the classification of stop consonant place of articulation in running speech using knowledge-based cues. Acoustic attributes are chosen to capture four categories of cues: amplitude and energy of burst, formant movement of adjacent vowels, spectrum of noise after the release, and some temporal cues. Correlation analysis shows no redundant information among cross-category at...

Transcription-based studies have shown that tense stops appear before aspirated or lax stops in most Korean-acquiring children's speech. This order of mastery is predicted by the short lag Voice Onset Time (VOT) values of Korean tense stops, as this is the earliest acquired phonation type across languages. However, the tense stop also has greater motor demands than the other two phonation types...

Recent studies on perceptual learning have indicated that listeners use intermediate units between the acoustic input and lexical representations of words. The same paradigm may also reveal the nature of these intermediate units based on patterns of generalization of learning. We here test whether learning generalizes to other units of the same underlying or surface representation. This was ach...

This work reports the use of nasal leakage to achieve the pressure difference for voicing in utterance-initial Spanish stops. Multiparametric aerodynamic and acoustic data were analyzed for six Spanish speakers. Two main patterns of prenasalization were identified in postpausal voiced stops: (i) delayed nasal closure relative to the oral closure and (ii) a momentary nasal opening (nasal burst) ...