Nasal air flow was measured during the speech of 112 normal subjects (59 females and 53 males) ranging in age from three years to 37 years, six months. Flow was zero during nearly all oral consonant and vowel utterances, suggesting that velopharyngeal closure was air-tight. Flow occurred during all nasal consonants and during vowels adjacent to nasal consonants. These effects were interpreted a...

This study investigated the ability to use cues contained within vowel and consonant segments by older listeners with normal or impaired hearing. Spectral shaping restored audibility for the hearing-impaired group. Word and sentence materials were processed to contain primarily consonants or vowels by replacing segments with low-level speech-shaped noise. The proportion of the total duration of...

The present investigation carried out acoustic analyses of vowels in clear and conversational speech produced by 41 talkers. Mixed-effects models were then deployed to examine relationships among acoustic and perceptual data for these vowels. Acoustic data include vowel duration, steady-state formant frequencies, and two measures of dynamic formant movement. Perceptual data consist of vowel int...

In studies of production and second language acquisition, it is typically assumed that when speakers produce a vowel between the consonants in a sequence that is phonotactically illegal in the native langauge, it is a result of the phonological epenthesis of a vowel (e.g. Tarone 1987, Broselow and Finer 1991, Hancin-Bhatt and Bhatt 1998, Davidson, Jusczyk and Smolensky 2003). For example, Taron...

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Stand...

Precise knowledge of lip and tongue movements is limited. Conventional investigative methods do not allow for their precise representation and analysis. In the present study, electromagnetic articulography (EMA) was used to define normal values for lip movements based on consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sequences and for tongue movements based on vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sequences. The study ...

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 ...

Eight speakers (4 male and 4 female) of the Muskogee dialect of Creek pronounced a set of words illustrating the vowels and diphthongs of Creek. These recordings were analyzed acoustically and data on vowel duration and vowel formant frequencies are presented in this paper. The ratio of the durations of dictinctively long and short vowels was 1.8. This ratio showed a sex difference, being large...

PURPOSE Speech perception can be described as the transformation of continuous acoustic information into discrete memory representations. Therefore, research on neural representations of speech sounds is particularly important for a better understanding of this transformation. Speech perception models make specific assumptions regarding the representation of mid vowels (e.g., [ε]) that are arti...

In Japanese, vowel duration can distinguish the meaning of words. In order for infants to learn this phonemic contrast using simple distributional analyses, there should be reliable differences in the duration of short and long vowels, and the frequency distribution of vowels must make these differences salient enough in the input. In this study, we evaluate these requirements of phonemic learn...