The voice onset time (VOT) of a stop consonant is the interval between its burst onset and voicing onset. Among a variety of research topics on VOT, one that has been studied for years is how VOTs are efficiently measured. Manual annotation is a feasible way, but it becomes a time-consuming task when the corpus size is large. This paper proposes an automatic VOT estimation method based on an on...

This paper presents findings from an instrumental study of Voice Onset Time (VOT) production in 3 English-Arabic bilingual children and 3 monolingual controls from each language. The subjects were all aged between 5 and 10, and the recordings were made in England and Lebanon. The aim was to find out whether bilinguals acquire separate VOT patterns for each language and whether these patterns ar...

The present paper examines phonetic characteristics of the initial stop consonants of English uttered by ESL learners whose native tongues are Korean, Thai, and Mandarin Chinese. It examines VOT (voice onset time) values of initial stops in the three languages and compares them with those of English stops produced by ESL learners of the three languages. From the acoustic analysis, it can be sai...

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the processes involved in the acquisition of new phonetic control regimes in L2 learning. We focus here on the acquisition of long VOT initial stops by French native speakers undergoing production training. Francophone speakers were asked to repeat /ta/ stimuli varying in VOT and burst intensity. The performances in production are assessed through a...

The goal of this study was to examine the neural encoding of voice-onset time distinctions that indicate the phonetic categories /da/ and /ta/ for human listeners. Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials (CAEP) were measured in conjunction with behavioral perception of a /da/-/ta/ continuum. Sixteen subjects participated in identification and discrimination experiments. A sharp category boundary wa...

Auditory evoked potentials measured from the guinea pig temporal lobe surface reflect acoustic elements of synthesized speech syllables. Eliciting stimuli included a four formant anchor stimulus /ba/, with a 40-ms formant transition duration. The other stimuli differed from /ba/ along simple acoustic dimensions. The /pa/ stimuli differed on a VOT continuum; /da/ stimuli had a higher frequency F...

Experiments investigating phonetic convergence in conversation often focus on interlocutors with similar phonetic inventories. Extending these experiments to those with dissimilar inventories requires understanding the capacity of speakers to imitate native and non-native phones. In the present study, we tested native Spanish and native English speakers to determine whether imitation of non-nat...

This paper is about one way in which prosody affects individual speech segments, with segmental phonetics showing a perhaps surprising sensitivity to higher-level linguistic structure. By prosody we mean the phrasal and tonal organization of speech. We will show that phonetic properties of individual segments depend on their prosodic position, or position in prosodic structure. It is well-known...

Speech perception flexibly adapts to short-term regularities of ambient speech input. Recent research demonstrates that the function of an acoustic dimension for speech categorization at a given time is relative to its relationship to the evolving distribution of dimensional regularity across time, and not simply to a fixed value along the dimension. Two experiments examine the nature of this d...

The main aim of the present work was to investigate whether vocal hyperfunction (VH), perceptual voice quality (VQ), gender, and phonetic environment influence Voice Onset Time (VOT). investigated group consisted 30 adults, including 19 women (X = 46.1 ± 13.7 years) 11 men 47.5 11.0 years), who had either phonotraumatic (PVH) non-phonotraumatic (NPVH). VQ judged considering overall severity dys...