This study explores the relationship between identification, degree of nasality and vowel quality in oral, nasal and nasalized vowels in Brazilian Portuguese. Despite common belief that the language possesses contrastive nasal vowels, literature examination shows that nasal vowels may be followed by a nasal resonance, while nasalized vowels must be followed by a nasal consonant. It is argued th...

This preliminary study aims at investigating the production and perception of the English nasals /m/ and /n/ in word-final position by a group of 10 intermediate Brazilian EFL learners. Production data was collected by means of a Sentence Reading Test considering preceding vowel as phonological context. Perception was assessed by means of an identification test contrasting native-like vs. nonna...

Vowel identification and production performance for an experimental group of 35 Japanese subjects was measured before and after a 6-week period within which subjects received identification training with feedback. A control group of 9 Japanese subjects was administered the same identification and preand posttest, separated by the same 6-week interval during which they did not receive the experi...

We show the perception of Canadian French (CF) vowels by Canadian English (CE) listeners and test a cue-weighting hypothesis to explain the attested assimilation patterns. Five CF vowels, /i, y, u, , æ/, and three allophonic variants, [, , ], were examined. The listeners completed a native-language identification task with goodness of fit judgments. We found that most French vowels were ide...

We show the perception of Canadian French (CF) vowels by Canadian English (CE) listeners and test a cue-weighting hypothesis to explain the attested assimilation patterns. Five CF vowels, /i, y, u, , æ/, and three allophonic variants, [, , ], were examined. The listeners completed a native-language identification task with goodness of fit judgments. We found that most French vowels were ide...

Earlier work [Nittrouer et al., J. Speech Hear. Res. 32, 120-132 (1989)] demonstrated greater evidence of coarticulation in the fricative-vowel syllables of children than in those of adults when measured by anticipatory vowel effects on the resonant frequency of the fricative back cavity. In the present study, three experiments showed that this increased coarticulation led to improved vowel rec...

This paper describes findings showing that the fundamental frequency (F0) fluctuation and amplitude modulation (AM) included in natural vowels contribute to improving the vowel identification rate in the presence of interferer sounds. A vowel identification experiment revealed that even very small F0 fluctuations and AM of vowels significantly improved the vowel identification rate in the prese...

Cochlear implants partially restore auditory sensation in individuals affected by severe to profound hearing loss. We investigated vowel detection, identification, and discrimination in a group of congenitally-deafened, unilaterally-implanted, Italian children and in a group of age-matched controls, by combining behavioral and neurophysiologic measures. Comparable vowel identification and discr...

Nasalization confounds the acoustic space by both crowding acoustic cues and also increasing the bandwidth of F1 which makes vowel identification, and hence classification by machine learning algorithms more complex. We present results from a set of machine learning (ML) algorithms that are trained on 15 acoustic features from the spectral and temporal domains to classify contextually nasalized...