Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

An experiment was carried out to examine the possibility of word-final F0 rise without lengthening in French. The results show that, although a variability is observed depending on speaker, syllable structure and syllable number, the final rise can be unaccompanied by vowel lengthening in the phrasemedian final syllable of a noun, in difference to the phrasefinal syllable which is lengthened to...

In this study we investigate whether non-native speakers using a speech recognition system would benefit from phone models of their own native language. For Dutch as the target recognition language, we found that American speakers do not in general benefit from American English models when speaking Dutch. However, using a CVC test methodology, we can conclude that for a certain level of profici...

Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...

In Japanese, high vowels may devoice between two unvoiced obstruents (k[u̥]kaku 'division', k[i̥]kaku 'plan'). Recent studies have shown that the devoicing of non-high vowels (k[ḁ]karu 'take', k[e̥]ta 'digit, k[o̥]tae 'answer') may also occur. This paper evaluates the role of vowel duration and vocal folds gestures involved in vowel devoicing in Japanese. An experiment using an electroglottograph (...

Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of segmental duration used in the Bell Labs Japanese TTS system. We describe the constraints on vowel devoicing, and effects of factors such as phone identity, surrounding phone identities, accentuation, syllabic structure, and phrasal position on the duration of...

This study extends a cross-linguistic collaboration on phonological development, which aims to compare production of word-initial obstruents across sets of languages which have comparable consonants that differ in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on ...

Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first 9 is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means 10 ‘frame’ and [katta] with a long [tt] means ‘bought’. This sort of contrast is usually limited 11 to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse 12 languages. The other...

This study was designed to identify English speech contrasts that might be appropriate for the computer-based auditory-visual training of Spanish learners of English. It examines auditory-visual and auditory consonant and vowel confusions by Spanish speaking students of English and a native English control group. 36 Spanish listeners were tested on their identification of 16 consonants and 9 vo...