It is widely claimed that close vowels in Japanese are devoiced when they occur between voiceless consonants. In this paper, voiceless vowels are represented symbolically as [V-] and voiced vowels as [V+]. The patterns of linguopalatal contact during C[V-]C units and the corresponding C[V+]C units are examined using the method of electropalatography (EPG). Our results show that C[V-]C units and...

The well-studied phenomenon of vowel lengthening before tense sonorants in Modern Irish (Ó Siadhail 1989, Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975, Ó Baoill 1979), exemplified in (1), is now well understood as a compensatory process (see for example Ní Chiosain 1991). Tense or long sonorants (L, L', R', N, N', m) trigger vowel lengthening and/or diphthongization. What is not clear about this phenomenon is th...

this study presents an overview of the different strategies that persian learners of english employ to deal with initial clusters. while vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. in this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. the first o...

Is Mandarin Chinese a syllable-timed language? Based on auditory impression, traditional analyses say it is. However, this question has rarely been investigated from the perspective of acoustic phonetics. Following Ramus et al. (1999) and Grabe and Low (2002), we measured the four rhythmic correlates: vowel percentage, consonant standard deviation, rPVI and nPVI in passage readings and conversa...

The aim of the paper is to study the production of Estonian vowel categories by L2 speakers of Estonian with a Russianlanguage background and to compare the results with perception data from the same subjects. Ten native Estonian subjects and ten L2 speakers participated in both the reading of an Estonian text corpus and the perception experiment. It was found that mostly the production and per...

The effectiveness of ten different feature sets in classification of voice recordings of the sustained phonation of the vowel sound /a/ into a healthy and pathological classes is investigated as well as a new approach to building a sequential committee of support vector machines (SVM) for the classification is proposed. The optimal values of hyper-parameters of the committee and the feature set...

This paper presents results for voicing maintenance during European Portuguese (EP) stop and fricative production. Results showed that EP presented a high amount of devoicing for all phonologically voiced stops and fricatives. This is in contrast to classical literature reporting high voicing maintenance during stop closure for Romance languages, but confirms our preliminary results from previo...

Choirs seem to exhibit varying proficiency of intonation (meaning the overall degree of precision in pitch) under differing acoustic conditions. If so, which conditions are the most conducive to correct intonation? Amateur male choir singers were asked to sing (one at a time) just intervals from a synthetic vowel tone whose spectrum arrd vibrato content were varied. The standard deviation in fu...

Although OE schwa has been viewed as an allophone, but not as a phoneme, the abstract schwa like the latter appears in the analysis of a phonological representation. The four pieces of evidence (posttonic weakening, derivation, distribution, and consonant lenition) converge to argue in favor of the underlying schwa of the syllabic consonants. The present discussion is, in terms of analyzing the...