Among Swedish dialects vowels differ a lot in contrast to consonants, and the variation in vowel pronunciation is important for characterizing dialectal identity. In this poster presentation Swedish dialects are classified on the basis of vowel pronunciation. The data come from the project Swedia2000 (http://swedia.ling.gu.se/) where vowels were elicited with mono-or bisyllabic words with vowel...

Two studies explored the role of native language use of an acoustic cue, vowel duration, in both native and non-native contexts in order to test the hypothesis that non-native listeners' reliance on vowel duration instead of vowel quality to distinguish the English tense/lax vowel contrast could be explained by the role of duration as a cue in native phonological contrasts. In the first experim...

To better understand audiovisual speech processing, we investigated the effects of viewing time-synchronized videos of a 3D tongue avatar on vowel production by healthy individuals. A group of 15 American English-speaking subjects heard pink noise over headphones and produced the word head under four viewing conditions: First, while viewing repetitions of the same vowel, /ɛ/ (baseline phase), t...

The three-way laryngeal contrast in Korean among lenis, fortis, and aspirated plosives has been well-described in previous linguistic studies. The results of this research have shown that the three laryngeal series are differentiated from each other along a number of articulatory, aerodynamic, and acoustic dimensions wordand phrase-initially: linguopalatal contact (Cho and Keating 2001), glotta...

Introduction: Aging reduces the ability to understand speech in noise. Hearing rehabilitation is one of the ways to help older people communicate effectively. This study aimed to investigate the effect of vowel auditory training on the improvement of speech-in-noise (SIN) perception among elderly listeners.   Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 36 elderly ...

This paper introduces several models for aligning etymological data, or for finding the best alignment at the sound or symbol level, given a set of etymological data. This will provide us a means of measuring the quality of the etymological data sets in terms of their internal consistency. Since one of our main goals is to devise automatic methods for aligning the data that are as objective as ...

This study examines the effects of lexical stress on vowel quality in Iberian Spanish and Central Catalan and the relationship between phonetic variation caused by stress and speech rate. For Catalan, both absence of stress and fast speech rate result in a shrunken vowel space. For Spanish, the effects of speech rate are in line with those found for Catalan. Yet, unstressed vowels are character...

Introduction The acquisition of vowels by normally developing children is an area that has received increasing attention in the past decade, but the substitutions that characterize children’s speech remain largely undocumented. Looking at adult phonological substitutions1, we find that the range of normal substitutions is very wide, but clear. There is every reason to believe that we should fin...

BACKGROUND Studies addressing the identification of sung vowels concern mainly the effect of the fundamental frequency (f0) and conclude that correct vowel identification decreases with increasing pitch. In one experiment, the impact of consonantal environment on the intelligibility of the vowels in high-pitched singing was also studied. The results of that experiment showed positive effect of ...

This paper presents the results of an acoustic investigation of the vowel sounds in three regional variants of Danish in spontaneous speech. The material for elicitation represents a conceptual fusion of word lists and interviews. A total of 18 subjects from three regions have been analysed. The expected regional differences have not been found. We find, however, clear indications that a genera...