Prior research has shown that the search function in the visual letter search task may reflect the regularities of the orthographic structure of a given script. In the present experiment, we examined whether the search function of letter detection was sensitive to consonant-vowel status of a pre-cued letter. Participants had to detect the presence/absence of a previously cued letter target (eit...

Consonant gemination in Italian affricates and fricatives was investigated, completing the overall study of consonants. Results analysis other consonant categories, i.e. stops, nasals, liquids, showed that closure duration for stops nasals form most salient acoustic cues to gemination. Frequency energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by a systematic way all classes. on confirm...

In Japanese conversations, rise-fall intonation with vowel lengthening often occurs on the final syllable of a phrase. This phrase-final rise-fall (PFRF) is a new type of intonation first reported in the 1960’s. Researchers consider PFRF intonation a discourse marker which functions to sharpen the phrase boundary and retain the utterance turn, but other phrase-final intonation such as phrase-fi...

The X-ray microbeam method for measurement of articulatory dynamics has been used to acquire large amounts of data, with reduced X-ray dosage, resulting in one of the most widely used freely available speech production databases. The Xray Microbeam Speech Production Database (XRMB-SPD), developed at Wisconsin University, USA, includes a vast amount of coordinate data describing articulatory mov...

Nasalization confounds the acoustic space by both crowding acoustic cues and also increasing the bandwidth of F1 which makes vowel identification, and hence classification by machine learning algorithms more complex. We present results from a set of machine learning (ML) algorithms that are trained on 15 acoustic features from the spectral and temporal domains to classify contextually nasalized...

The literature on vowel perception contains contradictory claims concerning the use of information from the consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions in vowel recognition. Some studies claim to have found that listeners use vowel formant track shape to compensate for changes in production brought about by coarticulation. Others claim that no evidence for such a compensation could be found...

The reduced energy level of unstressed syllables compromises perceptibility of vowel distinctions, leading to the ‘neutralization’ of some of the distinctions. The difference between the collapse of most vowels into [M] in English, and more restricted effects in other languages is shown to be managed by constraint ranking within OT. The same factors that compromise perceptibility of Vquality ar...