This study examined the production and perception of English vowels by highly experienced native Italian speakers of English. The subjects were selected on the basis of the age at which they arrived in Canada and began to learn English, and how much they continued to use Italian. Vowel production accuracy was assessed through an intelligibility test in which native English-speaking listeners at...

Tomoko Okuno, University of Michigan Debra M. Hardison, Michigan State University This study examined factors affecting perception training of vowel duration in L2 Japanese with transfer to production. In a pre-test, training, post-test design, 48 L1 English speakers were assigned to one of three groups: auditory-visual (AV) training using waveform displays, auditory-only (A-only), or no traini...

A distinction in vowel quantity is typically realized acoustically by vowel duration. Research on the perception of Swedish vowel quantity supports this and further suggests that when the duration of a vowel is relatively long (due, e.g., to inherent duration), vowel quantity may not be adequately cued by duration alone and may also make use of the vowel spectra to distinguish vowel quantities....

In this study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the specificity of adaptation to real-time formant shifting. During the experiments, talkers were adapted to altered auditory feedback for one vowel (trained vowel) and received unaltered feedback for a different vowel (untrained vowel). In the first experiment, production of the untrained vowel was measured while the talker was in th...

This study was designed to establish test-retest reliability of the consonant vowel and digit formats of the dichotic listening test with normal and learning-disabled children between the ages of 7 and 10 years. Between-group differences on ear advantage and total accuracy scores were also examined. The results indicated that both groups showed a right ear advantage and that there were no signi...

Danish has a distinctive vowel length opposition which is realized with little differences in vowel qualities. This paper investigates the possibilities of using this fact in reducing the size of the speech unit database in a high quality concatenative based text-to-speech system for Danish. The purpose is to evaluate the concept of using long vowels for synthesizing the corresponding short vow...

This study presents an overview of the different strategies that Persian learners of English employ to deal with initial clusters. While vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to Persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. In this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. The first o...

Current understanding of disability and impairment has led to new approaches in Rehabilitation. In this issue of Iranian Rehabilitation Journal, a variety of articles introduces a new trend in rehabilitation. "Emotion pitch" of each vowel sound and Percentage of vowel correct is the subject which Talie Zarifian and her colleagues discussed in their article. Persian speaking children can get ben...