The present study was designed to test whether phonetic sound change can take place within an individual beyond the critical age and, if so, whether it is gradual. An acoustic analysis was made of /u/-fronting and /æ/-lowering which are both sound changes that have occurred in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years. The speech data were taken from the messages that have been bro...

PURPOSE The present study was designed to investigate the relation of formant transitions to place-of-articulation for stop consonants. A speech production model was used to generate simulated utterances containing voiced stop consonants, and a perceptual experiment was performed to test their identification by listeners. METHOD Based on a model of the vocal tract shape, a theoretical basis f...

Dysarthria is a speech motor disorder usually resulting in a substantive decrease in speech intelligibility by the general population. In this study, we have significantly improved the intelligibility of dysarthric vowels of one speaker from 48% to 54%, as evaluated by a vowel identification task using 64 CVC stimuli judged by 24 listeners. Improvement was obtained by transforming the vowels of...

Portions of the procedure and analysis of the wide-band noise masking experiment in Miller-Nicely’s 1955 JASA paper (MN55) was repeated and a new set of data was collected in 2005. This classic paper is a commonly referenced work in which confusion matrices were collected for a set of consonant-vowels (CVs). From an analysis of the original results, they made conclusions about the robustness of...

Correspondence between the glottal opening gesture pattern and vowel devoicing in Japanese was examined using PGG with special reference to the pattern of glottal gesture overlap and blending into the neighboring vowel. The results showed that most of the tokens demonstrated either a single glottal opening pattern with a devoiced vowel, or a double glottal opening with a voiced vowel during /Ci...

Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...

In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties (including standard Danish) was assessed among young Danes from Copenhagen. In addition, distances between standard Danish and each of the 17 varieties were measured at the lexical level and at different phonetic levels. In order to determine how well these linguistic levels can predict intelligibility, we c...

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...