Recent studies have shown that talkers implicitly imitate/accommodate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech [1, 2]. However, it has also been shown that this phonetic imitation effect is not an automatic process [3, 4]: in [3], the artificially lengthened VOT on /p/ was imitated in a non-shadowing task, while shortened VOT (which could jeopardize phonemic contrast) was not imitated, ...

This paper presents the first description of vowel devoicing in Quechua. The characteristics of the process as well as the environments most conducive to its occurrence are reported based on an analysis of 4062 vowels extracted from interviews with 16 speakers of the Cusco Collao dialect. Patterns of Quechua vowel devoicing appear to be generally consistent with the gestural overlap model that ...

This research explores the representation and access of lexical form during spoken word recognition. Two experiments were conducted examining segmental priming effects. In the first set of experiments, a single fricative segment functioned as a prime to targets with either a matching or mismatching fricative in initial (Experiment 1a) or final (Experiment 1b) position. In the second set of expe...

Two factors were experimentally varied in order to study their effects on silent interval and segment duration at NP-VP boundaries in Swedish sentences. These factors, the syntactic complexity of the NP and VP portions as well as the length of the words in the sentence both had significant effects on silent interval duration. Concerning word length, the general trend was an increase in silent i...

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of place of articulation on voice onset time (VOT) of Persian initial plosive productions for Iranian cleft palate children. Fifteen cleft palate children and twenty children born without cleft were asked to produce seven words in CVC syllabic pattern. The initial consonant of the syllable was a plosive; the vowel was the close, front vowel /i...

This paper proposed two acoustic modelings of the onsetrhyme for speech recognition. The two models are Phonotactic Onset-Rhyme Model (PORM) and Contextual Onset-Rhyme Model (CORM). The models comprise a pair of onset and rhyme units, which makes up a syllable. An onset comprises an initial consonant and its transition towards the following vowel. Together with the onset, the rhyme consists of ...

Maintaining voicing in obstruents is articulatorily challenging. During obstruent closure, intraoral air pressure goes up quickly, and as a consequence it becomes difficult to maintain a sufficient transglottal air pressure drop to produce voicing. This difficulty becomes more problematic in geminates, which have long closures (Hayes and Steriade 2004; Jaeger 1978; Ohala 1983; Westbury 1979). R...

While a brief or lightly-articulated nasal consonant has long been reported after word-final nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), little is known about its place of articulation or factors contributing to its occurrence. The results of an electropalatographic (EPG) study indicate that the consonant’s emergence is most likely tied to the tongue position of the nasal vowel and that its plac...