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...

This study aims to quantify the relative contributions of phonetic categories and acoustic detail on phonotactically induced perceptual vowel epenthesis in Japanese listeners. A vowel identification task tested whether a vowel was perceived within illegal consonant clusters and, if so, which vowel was heard. Cross-spliced stimuli were used in which vowel coarticulation present in the cluster di...

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on preceding vowel is important signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The vowel-consonant monosyllabic words Cantonese represents a testing case for ...

Cross-linguistically, vowel length contrasts may involve changes in vowel quality. In a different but more gradient way, speech style influences vowel articulation. While both alter vowel acoustics, it remains unclear whether both are byproducts of general processes of vowel undershoot or reflect a modification of articulatory gestures independent of durational constraints. This study investiga...

The vowel space reflects the right-angled shape of the vocal tract, and many consonants exploit the palatal wall. These two facts suggest the importance of the geometry of peripheral structure in speech production. In this study, the relationship between geometry and articulatory variation was examined using a database of English and Japanese speakers. The geometry of each speaker's vocal tract...

The classification of unvoiced stops in consonant–vowel (CV) syllables, segmented from continuous speech, is investigated by features related to speech production. As burst and vocalic transitions contribute to identification of stops in the CV context, features are computed from both regions. Although formants are the truly discriminating articulatory features, their estimation from the speech...

In Japanese, there is frequent alternation between CV morae and moraic geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzed the phonemic environments of consonant gemination (CG) using the “Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ).” The results revealed that the environment in which gemination occurs is, to some extent, parallel to that of vowel devoicing. However, there are two crucial differences. One...

Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of vowel duration used in the Bell Labs Japanese TTS system. We describe the constraints on vowel devoicing, and effects of factors such as phone identity, surrounding phone identities, accentuation, syllabic structure, and phrasal position on the duration of bot...

This paper discusses two well-known phonetic-phonological phenomena of Japanese, vowel devoicing and mora-timed rhythm. Regarding vowel devoicing as a process of vowels getting consonantal, it may change the mora-templated syllable structures of Japanese, resulting in the deviation from mora-timed rhythm. To investigate spontaneous Japanese with comparison to other languages, the label data of ...

Vowel devoicing is a phenomenon that is reported to occur in many languages such as Japanese, Parisian and Montreal French, Turkish and English. This paper investigates vowel devoicing in Korean. A devoiced vowel does not exhibit characteristic vocal tract resonances, and instead is realized as a long interval of aspiration or frication following consonant release, resulting in non-distinct seg...