BACKGROUND Nasalance is used to evaluate the velopharyngeal incompetence in clinical diagnoses using a nasometer. The aim of this study is to find the nasalance differences between Vietnamese cleft palate children and Korean cleft palate children by measuring the nasalance of five oral vowels. METHODS Ten Vietnamese cleft palate children after surgery, three Vietnamese children for the contro...

Purpose: This study examined the benefit of bimodal hearing (i.e., one cochlear implant and a contralateral hearing aid) for listening to words and sentences in quiet and in noise, the identification of vowels and immediate phonological memory. Method: Two groups of twenty adult cochlear implant recipients, those who used bimodal hearing on a regular basis, and those who used one cochlear impla...

Unlike most other modern Bantu languages, Kinande has faithfully preserved the Proto-Bantu contrast between [-ATR] and [+ATR] high vowels (Hyman, 2002). As a result, while other Bantu languages typically have only two contrastive high vowels (i.e. high back and high front), Kinande has four: [-ATR] [i u] and [+ATR] i u ]. 1 These four high vowels, together with mid [e o] and low [a], are laid o...

From an acoustic point of view, the study of nasal vowels is complex. Numerous acoustic properties of French nasal vowels have been deduced by simulation experiments. Few authors have founded their analysis on the observation of laboratory speech. Alternatively, the analyzed vocalic realizations found herein are taken from a corpus of spontaneous speech. The 20–male speakers, recorded are nativ...

The study is a phonetic analysis of the vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs in Meixian Hakka. The formant measurements as well as the temporal organization are presented. Results show that (1) the relative distance between the mid vowels and the high vowels differ in male and female speech in Meixian Hakka; (2) diphthongs in Meixian Hakka may be separated into two categories according to the dif...

In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in F0, intensity, duration, F1, and voice quality, but F0 is the best predictor of primary stress. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly cued by a difference in F0. With regards to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowe...

To study the effects of frequency shifts on vowel identification, a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) was used to process a set of vowels in /hVd/ syllables spoken by two adult males, two adult females, and two children. Vowel identification accuracy was reduced when the spectrum envelope was shifted upward by a factor of 2.0, or downward by a factor of 0.6. Upward shifts produced a smaller decli...

For both human and automatic speech recognizers it is difficult to segment continuous speech into discrete units such as words. Word segmentation is so hard because there seem to be no self-evident cues for word boundaries in the speech stream. However, it has been suggested that English listeners can profit from the occurrence of full vowels (i.e. vowels with metrical stress) in the speech str...

This paper examines the production of the English tense-lax contrast in high and mid front vowels by native speakers of Catalan. Despite the absence of temporal contrasts in the L1, Catalans have been found to rely on duration in their perception of English vowels. Some English vowels have been found to be perceived by Catalans as near identical to L1 vowels. This study explores this further by...

This study explores how experience with native language (L1) diphthongs influences the assimilation of non-native diphthongs. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of L1 attunement, native Australian English (AusE) speakers categorized and rated the Danish diphthongs, in addition to the monophthongs, in relation to their entire native vowel inventory. Short Danish vowels were assimilated to b...