One of the most common complaints expressed by individuals with hearing loss is the difficulty in understanding speech when listening in background noise. This paper highlights the importance of enhancement of an important acoustic attribute of clear speech -‘Consonant-Vowel intensity ratio’. A case for synthetic clear speech in the context of hearing impairment was developed. Consonant recogni...

The phonetic identification ability of an individual (SS) who exhibits the best, or equal to the best, speech understanding of patients using the Symbion four-channel cochlear implant is described. It has been found that SS: (1) can use aspects of signal duration to form categories that are isomorphic with the phonetic categories established by listeners with normal auditory function; (2) can c...

This research explores the representation and access of lexical form during spoken word recognition. Two experiments were conducted examining segmental priming effects. In the first set of experiments, a single fricative segment functioned as a prime to targets with either a matching or mismatching fricative in initial (Experiment 1a) or final (Experiment 1b) position. In the second set of expe...

This paper deals with estimations of aspirated air flow in a threedimensional vocal tract during fricative consonant phonation using the Finite Element Method (FEM). The shape of the 3-D vocal tract during phonation of fricative consonant /s/ is reconstructed from 32 coronal Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. MR images of the dental crown that contains a small amount of water were obtained using a...

Eight native speakers of American English each produced ten tokens of all possible CV, FCV, and VFCV utterances with V = [a] or [u], F = [s] or [integral of], and C = [t] or [k]. Acoustic analysis showed that the formant transition onsets following the stop consonant release were systematically influenced by the preceding fricative, although there were large individual differences. In particula...

We investigated 2-month-old infants' perception of a subset of highly confusable English fricatives. In Experiment 1, infants discriminated modified natural tokens of the voiceless fricative pair [fa]/[oa] but only when the syllables included their frication noises. They also discriminated the voiced pair [va]/[oa] both with and without fricative noises. These results parallel those found with ...

Aspirated fricatives are typologically rare in world’s languages, occurring mostly in the Sino–Tibetan languages. However, they are hitherto unreported in the Tibeto–Burman languages spoken in North–East India. In this study we present data from Bodo, a Tibeto–Burman language spoken in Assam, India and argue that the Bodo voiceless alveolar fricative is an aspirated voiceless alveolar fricative...

Literatures pertaining to English and Mandarin fricative/affricate productions by adults with cerebral palsy (CP) showed that acoustic measurements such as rise time contrast, initial burst rate contrast and friction noise duration contrast associated with fricative/affricate productions were highly correlated with overall speech intelligibility. However, the phonetic features of fricatives/aff...

We investigate the durational properties of Moroccan Arabic identical consonant sequences contrasting singleton (S) and geminate (G) dental fricatives, in six combinations of fourlevel length contrasts across word boundaries (#) (one timing slot for #S, two for #G and S#S, three for S#G and G#S, and four for G#G). The aim is to determine the nature of the mapping between discrete phonological t...

The presented study concerns the influence of the syllabic structure on perceived prominence. We examined how gaps in the F0 contour due to unvoiced consonants affect prominence perception, given that such gaps can either be filled or blinded out by listeners. For this purpose we created a stimulus set of real disyllabic words which differed in the quantity of the vowel of the accented syllable...