On the basis of theoretical considerations and the results of experiments with synthetic consonant-vowel syllables, it has been hypothesized that the short-time spectrum sampled at the onset of a stop consonant should exhibit gross properties that uniquely specify the consonantal place of articulation independent of the following vowel. The aim of this paper is to test this hypothesis by measur...

INTRODUCTION Spatio-temporal distributions of cortical activity to audio-visual presentations of meaningless vowel-consonant-vowels and the effects of audio-visual congruence/incongruence, with emphasis on the McGurk effect, were studied. The McGurk effect occurs when a clearly audible syllable with one consonant, is presented simultaneously with a visual presentation of a face articulating a s...

OBJECTIVES Voice and speech alternations that can occur after total thyroidectomy are usually due to recurrent or superior laryngeal nerve injury. These alterations may also be associated with other extralaryngeal factors, such as neck muscle dysfunction and scar contracture of the neck. We performed a prospective acoustic analysis on speech changes after surgery, in the absence of laryngeal ne...

This paper presents an acoustic and electropalatographic study of how vowel-less syllables and their constituents are phonetically implemented in Tashlhiyt Berber. Three issues are addressed. First, we determine whether the acoustic and articulatory make-up of a consonant changes as a function of its position within a syllable (C-nucleus vs. C-onset vs. C-coda). Second, we consider the patterns...

Speech perception depends on the auditory system's ability to extract relevant acoustic features from competing background noise. Despite widespread acknowledgement that noise exacerbates this process, little is known about the neurophysiologic mechanisms underlying the encoding of speech in noise. Moreover, the relative contribution of different brain nuclei to these processes has not been ful...

This paper is about one way in which prosody affects individual speech segments, with segmental phonetics showing a perhaps surprising sensitivity to higher-level linguistic structure. By prosody we mean the phrasal and tonal organization of speech. We will show that phonetic properties of individual segments depend on their prosodic position, or position in prosodic structure. It is well-known...

Within and across languages the realization of consonant voicing is highly variable. This study aims to identify, and quantify, the segmental, prosodic and positional factors that have an influence on consonant voicing. A widely used acoustic measure of voicing, viz. voice onset time, is known to have disadvantages both in a cross-linguistic framework, where it fails to provide sufficient Infor...

Multilingual speech recognition system is required for tasks that use several languages in one speech recognition application. In this paper, we propose an approach for multilingual speech recognition by spotting consonant-vowel (CV) units. The important features of spotting approach are that there is no need for automatic segmentation of speech and it is not necessary to use models for higher ...

This Thesis explores the development of word-initial s+plosive consonant clusters in the speech of Swedish children between the ages of 1;6 and 4;6. Development in the word-initial consonant clusters is viewed as being determined by 1) the children’s ability to articulate the target sequence of consonants, 2) the level of understanding of which acoustic features in the adult model production ar...