This study investigated the significant acoustic cues used in the perception of aspiration contrast in Cantonese initial stops by normal hearing adults. The effects of vowel characteristics, aspiration noise level and voice-onset time (VOT) duration on aspiration perception in Cantonese initial stops were studied. The stimuli were consonant-vowel (CV) real words recorded by a male Cantonese nat...

We used an innovative technique to measure the trajectories of vowel nasality in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Portuguese. An SVM classifier was trained on MFCC parameters at five positions in nasal and oral vowels, and the “nasality trajectory” for each language was evaluated in terms of classification accuracy at each of the five positions. The results support the view that Portugue...

The coordination of velum and lingual gestures for Brazilian Portuguese nasal vowels in CV syllables is studied with real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI). Four syllable structures were compared: stop-oral vowel, stop-nasal vowel, nasal-oral vowel, nasal-nasal vowel. Results show near-synchrony timing (in-phase) for the consonant onset and nasal vowel’s lingual onset, and for the conson...

This paper considers sources of error in common vowel formant extraction techniques, investigating the extent to which the temporal point of measurement and software settings influence the formant values obtained. To do this, we report on the results of a vowel measurement simulation where, rather than extracting a single measurement for each vowel token, thousands of measurements are taken for...

Cochlear implants partially restore auditory sensation in individuals affected by severe to profound hearing loss. We investigated vowel detection, identification, and discrimination in a group of congenitally-deafened, unilaterally-implanted, Italian children and in a group of age-matched controls, by combining behavioral and neurophysiologic measures. Comparable vowel identification and discr...

Three psycho-acoustical experiments were carried out to investigate relative importance of formant frequency and whole spectral shape as cues for vowel perception. Four types of vowel-like signals were presented to eight listeners. The mean responses for stimuli including both formant and amplitude-ratio feature were quite similar to those for the stimuli including only formant peak feature. No...

It has been pointed out that a word which contains an identical vowel sequence may not be distinguished, especially in faster speech, from a word which has a long vowel and phonologically the same mora-count. However, this indication has been made without any objective evidence and it is argued that a quantitative study is needed to investigate the acoustic characteristics of identical vowel se...

This study investigates the relationship between variation due to prosodic prominence and variation due to sound change. We compare two hypotheses: under prominence vowels move in the direction of vowel shift, and under prominence vowels are hyperarticulated, and move to positions more peripheral in the vowel space. These hypotheses make competing predictions for two vowels currently undergoing...