A miniature accelerometer and microphone can be used to obtain Horii Oral-Nasal Coupling (HONC) scores to objectively measure nasalization of speech. While this instrumentation compares favorably in terms of size and cost relative to other objective measures of nasality, the metric has not been well characterized in children. Furthermore, the measure is known to be affected by vowel loading, as...

This paper examines the differences between three Croatian folk singing styles, namely klapa, ojkanje, and tarankanje. In order to factor out singer-specific properties, each of the styles was performed by the same 12 professional male singers. The 36 performances were analyzed with a long-term average spectrum (LTAS) method from which direct effects of the pitch distribution were removed. Afte...

Cochlear implants are neuroprostheses designed to restore speech perception in case of profound bilateral hearing loss. As speech is fundamentally an audiovisual percept, a deficit in processing auditory information might lead to changes in audiovisual integration of speech comprehension. Using vowel-consonant-vowel stimuli under unimodal, audiovisual congruent and audiovisual incongruent (McGu...

OBJECTIVES Our study aimed to highlight the effectiveness of palatal lift prosthesis in patients with velopharyngeal insufficiency with previous operated cleft palate. METHODS This study was done undertaken January 2008 to December of 2009 in the Phoniatic unit of Alnoor Specialist Hospital, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Ten patients of ≥ 8 years to ≤ 10 years of age, who had previously undergone sur...

High quality speech at low bit rates (e.g., 2400 bits/s) is one of the important objectives of current speech research. As part of long range activity on this problem, we have developed an efficient computer program that will serve as a tool for investigating whether articulatory speech synthesis may achieve this low bit rate. At a sampling frequency of 8 kHz, the most comprehensive version of ...

This paper addresses the questions of whether lexical information influences phoneme discrimination in children with cochlear implants (CI) and whether this influence is similar to what occurs in normal-hearing (NH) children. Previous research with CI children evidenced poor accuracy in phonemic perception, which might have an incidence on the use of lexical information in phoneme discriminatio...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate changes in nasal resistance to ajrflow in persons undergoing rapid maxillary expansion and to reevaluate the responses at a l-year follow-up. Nasal resistance measurements, assessed in four modes (natural state, anterior nares dilation with Tygon tubing, following administration of decongestant, and nares dilation with tubing and decongestant), were tak...

In the framework of studies on nasality, we have attempted to develop a 3-D articulatory model of velum. Sets of 25 sagittal MRI images have been collected for one French subject sustaining 46 articulations. Contours of the velum have been manually drawn from these images; a common 3-D triangular mesh has then been fitted to these contours in order to constitute 3-D representations of the velum...

This work is an attempt to construct a perceptual representation of Thai consonants based on perceptual identification results (from 28 Thais) of 21 phonemes presented in noise. The experiment is designed to equally make pairwise comparisons among 21 word-initial phonemes, which results in 210 real-word stimulus pairs. Percent correct responses and confusion matrices are obtained. Similarity sc...

It is frequently the case that phonological patterns exhibit asymmetric properties with respect to their featural content. Such asymmetries may involve a variety of properties including stability, level of activity, nature of assimilatory target, nature of assimilatory trigger, and nature of epenthetic segment. Consider examples of these properties briefly. With regard to stability, it may be t...