background and aim: speech understanding almost never occurs in silence. verbal communication often occurs in environments where multiple speakers are talking. in such environments, babbling noise masks speech comprehension. consonants, in comparison to vowels, are more sensitive to noise masking. consonants provide most acoustic information needed for comprehending the meaning of the word. sin...

We address methodological issues in calculating the size of the working vowel space area. Although corner vowels are most commonly used in determining its size, we show that this approach may severely underestimate the actual working space. The vowel spaces determined using the large vowels set provided insight into subtle differences between dialects and among age groups. Three approaches were...

This paper sought to determine whether L1 vowel inventory size could be a contributing factor to the use of temporal cues in L2 vowel perception. The participants were L1 Catalan (n=20) and L1 Danish (n=20) EFL learners and L1 English control group (n=7). We hypothesized that the smaller vowel inventory of Catalan could result in difficulties in discerning spectral di...

This study examined spectral properties of the Hungarian vowel pair /i/ vs. /i:/ with contrasting phonemic vowel lengths in 2;0 and 4;0 years old boys acquiring Hungarian as their native language. Results were obtained by an automated pitchsynchronous bandfilter analysis method that estimates the spectral envelope representation of vowels. Subsequent data reduction was achieved via principal co...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced iranian esl learners. a total of 36 adult iranian esl learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at memorial university (mun) were recruited for the study. advanced participants had the experience of living in canada for at least three years while beginners...