This paper reports electroglottographic (EGG) data for consonant sequences composed of a word final stop or fricative followed by a voiced consonant produced by eight speakers of a Romance language, i.e., Catalan, where these clusters undergo regressive voicing assimilation. Analysis results reveal considerable speakerand consonant-dependent differences in the temporal period of vocal fold vibr...

This study investigated whether the steady-state suppression method proposed by Arai et al. (2001, 2002) improved consonant identification for nonnative listeners in reverberation. It also compared the effect of steady-state suppression on consonant identification by native and nonnative listeners in reverberation. We used steady-state suppression as a preprocessing technique which processes sp...

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN COMMUNICATION SCIENCE AND DISORDERS • Volume 28 • 20–29 • Spring 2001 © NSSLHA 1092-5171/01/2801-0020 ABSTRACT: Spoken word recognition was investigated in a group of children aged 3:0 to 7:11 (years:months) to assess the relationship between five measures of language development and spoken word recognition accuracy. Two spoken word recognition tasks, gated words and nois...

A hybrid PARAFAC and principal-component model of tongue configuration in vowel production is presented, using a corpus of German vowels in multiple consonant contexts (fleshpoint data for seven speakers at two speech rates from electromagnetic articulography). The PARAFAC approach is attractive for explicitly separating speaker-independent and speaker-dependent effects within a parsimonious li...

To estimate the contributions of feedforward vs. feedback control systems in speech articulation, we analyzed the correspondence between initial and final kinematics in unperturbed tongue and jaw movements for consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel-consonant (VC) syllables. If movement extents and endpoints are highly predictable from early kinematic information, then the movements were most likely com...

Mismatch negativity (MMN) was used to investigate the processing of cluster and noncluster initial consonants in consonant-vowel syllables in the human brain. The MMN was elicited by either syllable with cluster or noncluster initial consonant, phonetic contrasts being identical in both syllables. Compared to the noncluster consonant, the cluster consonant elicited a more prominent MMN. The MMN...

The current paper reports on a study which fits in a larger investigation on variability in the pronunciation of Standard Dutch, as spoken in the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium. In particular, it deals with the factors that determine the possible insertion of a schwa in specific consonant clusters at the end of words. Our study reveals that the absence or occurrence of such an extr...

PURPOSE This study provides a comprehensive examination of substitutions that occur at Greenlee's 3rd stage of cluster development (M. Greenlee, 1974). At this stage of cluster acquisition, children are able to produce the correct number of consonants but with 1 or more of these consonants being substituted for another. METHOD Participants were 11 typically developing children ages 1;5-2;7 (y...

Formant frequency data for /l/ in 23 languages/dialects where the consonant may be typically clear or dark show that the two varieties of /l/ are set in contrast mostly in the context of /i/ but also next to /a/, and that a few languages/dialects may exhibit intermediate degrees of darkness in the consonant. F2 for /l/ is higher utterance initially than utterance finally, more so if the lateral...

Final vowel devoicing is a feature of Continental French in which utterance-final vowels lose their voicing and produce fricative-like whistles. Previous studies have examined the phenomenon’s phonological and pragmatic tendencies, revealing its preference for high vowels in open syllables at the ends of statements. Here, we re-examine and expand upon previous work by investigating the role of ...