The presence of obstruent consonants constitutes key landmark events with cues that indicate abrupt acoustic discontinuities in the speech signal. Such discontinuities allow further analysis and recognition to be performed in knowledge-based speech recognition systems. This paper describes an acoustical investigation on Thai obstruent consonant detection using average level crossing rate (ALCR)...

A basic constituent of French intonation is the Accentual Phrase (AP), which includes two distinct tonal events: a final LH* accentual rise and an initial LHi rise. A previous study had shown a difference between the rising movements according to the the position of the AP within the intonational phrase (IP): prenuclear (P, IP-initial) versus nuclear (N, IPfinal). The present paper explains thi...

Auditory and audio-visual speech perception was investigated using auditory signals of invariant spectral envelope that temporally encoded the presence of voiced and voiceless excitation, variations in amplitude envelope and F0. In experiment 1, the contribution of the timing of voicing was compared in consonant identification to the additional effects of variations in F0 and the amplitude of v...

This year we continued our multisite collaboration aimed at improved understanding and modeling of how listeners handle noisy or corrupt speech. On the perception side, we have continued experiments on how listeners perceive distorted and incomplete speech tokens, including the use of our spondee/foil paradigm, in which listeners are played tokens derived from two-syllable compound words which ...

Using a response-priming procedure, five experiments examined the effects of vowel similarity on the motor programming of spoken syllables. In this procedure, subjects prepared to produce a pair of spoken syllables as rapidly as possible, but sometimes had to produce the syllables in reverse order instead. The spoken responses consisted of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables whose medial ...

Consonant repetition ("reduplication") predominates in #CVC sequences in babbling and early words, gradually giving way to consonant variation ("variegation") with a "Fronting" pattern whereby the first consonant has a more anterior place of articulation than the second. The various reduplicative patterns are primarily attributed to a "Frame" consisting of rhythmic mandibular oscillation. Evide...

Intra-gestural and inter-gestural coordination in German word-initial consonant clusters /kl, kn, ks, pl, ps/ is investigated in four speakers by means of EMA as a function of segmental make-up and prosodic variation, i.e. prosodic boundary strength and lexical stress. Segmental make-up is shown to determine the extent of articulatory overlap of the clusters, with /kl/ exhibiting the highest de...

In Tokyo Japanese, vowel devoicing is a common process, that leads to the reduction of high, unstressed vowels ( and ) between unvoiced consonants. This article investigates to what extent native Japanese speakers (L1) learning German as foreign language (L2) show a strong tendency to produce these vowels in the foreign language as devoiced, too. Furthermore, the question is addressed whe...

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet a...