This paper proposes a scheme of using F0 contours of vowel nuclei to discriminate Chinese lexical tones. The authors suggest that the F0 contour fragment of a vowel nucleus of a syllable contributes most to tone perception of the syllable. To correlate the F0 contour with the phonemic components of a syllable, a tone-based syllabic structure is also proposed. Tone recognition experiments on a s...

A computational framework for quantitative studies of sound acquisition in a second language is presented. The framework supports the exploration of issues such as the effect of the amount and type of exposure to L2 categories, interactions between L1 and L2 sound systems as well as L1 attrition. The model is illustrated by simulating a Chinese listener’s responses to English vowel-consonant-vo...

The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of work leading to the view that vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) plays a significant role in vowel perception. The view that implicitly guided vowel perception research for many years was the idea that nearly all of the information that was needed to specify vowel quality was to be found in a cross section of the vowel spectrum sampl...

In this paper, changes in acoustic characteristic of young children speech are investigated as a function of age. We examined fundamental frequency, formant frequencies and vowel durations of ten monophtongal vowels from American-English speaking children, age groups 3 to 6. In this study, we also examined the vowel pronunciation variability of young-aged children. The results show that prescho...

The present study examines two methods for learning and modeling vowel harmony from text corpora. The first uses Expectation Maximization with Hidden Markov Models to find the most probable HMM for a training corpus. The second uses pointwise Mutual Information between distant vowels in a Boltzmann distribution, along with the Minimal Description Length principle to find and model vowel harmony...

Does motor learning generalize to new situations that are not experienced during training, or is motor learning essentially specific to the training situation? In the present experiments, we use speech production as a model to investigate generalization in motor learning. We tested for generalization from training to transfer utterances by varying the acoustical similarity between these two set...

A visual speech training aid for persons with hearing impairments has been developed using a Windows-based multimedia computer. In previous papers, the signal processing steps and display options have been described for giving real-time feedback about the quality of pronunciation for 10 steady-state American English monopthong vowels (/aa/, /iy/, /uw/, /ae/, /er/, /ih/, /eh/, /ao/, /ah/, and /u...

Talkers vary in the phonetic realization of their vowels. One influential hypothesis holds that listeners overcome this inter-talker variability through pre-linguistic auditory mechanisms normalize acoustic or cues form input to speech recognition. Dozens competing normalization accounts exist—including both specific vowel perception and general purpose can be applied any type cue. We add cross...

English nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant syllables were presented at four different signal-to-noise ratios for recognition. Information theory methods are used to analyze the response data according to segment type and phonological feature, and are consistent with previous studies showing that the consonantal contrast of voicing is more robust than place of articulation, word-initial consonan...

We are investigating acoustical analysis for dysarthric speech, which appears as a symptom of neurologic disease, in order to elucidate its physiological and acoustical mechanism, and to develop aids for diagnosis and training, etc. In this report, acoustical characteristics of various kinds of dysarthrias are measured. As a result, shrinking of the F0 range as well as vowel space are observed ...