This paper discusses issues including tongue position, tongue movement space, constraint etc. of Mongolian word-initial consonants. The experimental result shows that word-initial consonant tongue horizontal movement space is constrained by constriction position and is in conformity with the rule that front consonant leads to smaller tongue movement space; higher consonant leads to smaller tong...

This paper focuses on the perception and production of the English alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) in syllable coda by Brazilian learners of English. In the production test, the participants read a list of English sentences containing alveolar stops in word-final position. The preceding and following phonological contexts were controlled, so that the effect of context on the production of the alve...

PURPOSE Temporal order abilities decrease with age. Declining temporal processing abilities may influence the identification of rapid vowel sequences. Identification patterns for asynchronous vowel pairs were explored across the life span. METHOD Young, middle-aged, and older listeners completed temporal order tasks for pairs of 70-ms and 40-ms vowel stimuli. For a given vowel duration, natur...

Speech production and speech perception studies were conducted to compare (de)voicing in the Romance languages European Portuguese (EP) and Italian. For the speech production part, velar stops in two positions and four vowel contexts were recorded. The voicing status for 10 consecutive landmarks during stop closure was computed. Results showed that during the complete stop closure voicing was a...

We present an initial study on how to model smiled speech with an articulatory speech synthesizer, led by the research question as to what cues are responsible for the effect of an audible distinction of smiled vs. non-smiled speech. In a perception test, we explore the relative contributions of i) spreading of the lips, ii) raising of the larynx, and iii) raising of the fundamental frequency. ...

Previously, it has been shown that using clear speech short-term spectra improves the intelligibility of conversational speech. In this paper, a speech transformation method is used to map the spectral features of conversational speech to resemble clear speech. A joint-density Gaussian mixture model is used as the mapping function. The transformation is studied in both the formant frequency and...

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 exploited in the L1. Twenty native speakers each of American English, Latin American Spanish and Es...

Vowel duration and local fundamental frequency changes are investigated as acoustical cues to vowel quantity identification by Japanese listeners. To examine the role of these factors, a perception experiment was carried out. The results indicate that, even though vowel duration serves as a dominant perceptual cue, when vowel quantity cannot be adequately cued by vowel duration alone, the F0 in...