This paper is to examine Mandarin rhythm spoken in Taiwan. Oral recordings of twenty speakers who took the National Exam of Qualified Mandarin Teachers held in Taiwan in 2010. Based on the oral scores, they were evenly divided into two different groups: high oral proficiency (HOP) and low oral proficiency (LOP). Rhythmic correlates in sentence reading were analyzed from two perspectives: (a) pi...

The present study examined F1 and F2 onset, as well as locus equations in Greek fricative – vowel sequences as distinctive cues for the fricative place of articulation. The effects of voicing, speaker’s gender and post-fricative vowel on both formants’ onset values and locus equations were also investigated. The results showed that F2 onset values distinguished fricatives in terms of place of a...

Recent arguments in the phonological literature favor treating the root-and-template patterns of Semitic morphology not by means of an abstract consonantal root, as in traditional standard approaches, but rather by deriving new forms from full surface strings (containing ordered consonants and vowels and prosodic structure). In this paper I explore the implications of this proposal for the gene...

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words, by testing children's sensitivity to 1-...

The present study used concurrent-vowel recognition to measure integration efficiency of combined acoustic and electric stimulation in eight actual cochlear-implant subjects who had normal or residual low-frequency acoustic hearing contralaterally. Although these subjects could recognize single vowels (>90% correct) with either electric or combined stimulation, their performance degraded signif...

This paper reports two experiments that examine unstressed vowel reduction and neutralisation in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian. Stress-dependent F1 and F2 frequency variation was measured for the central and back vowel pairs in careful speech. The results reveal a less unequivocal picture of the pairwise convergence of formant frequencies than has previously been reported: the data confirm a ...

In Wason's selection task, subjects see four cards showing symbols like E, K, 4, and 7, and are told that each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The task is to choose the cards that need to be turned over in order to determine whether the following rule is true or false: “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Most subjects choos...