The present paper deals with the problem of quality and quantity change (reduction) of unstressed vowels in Russian depending on their position relative to the stressed syllable and to the word boundaries. Quality change is measured by calculating the probability of vowel omission or replacement by another vowel phoneme. The study is based on a large corpus of read speech (over 30 hours). The r...

Morphophonological alternations in English words such as able versus ability involve changes in both stress and vowel quality. This study examined how native speakers of Spanish and English produced four such morphologically related English word pairs. Degree of stress and vowel quality was assessed auditorily and instrumentally. Stress placement generally seemed to constitute less of a learnin...

The quality of an epenthetic vowel in a particular language may vary depending on segmental and prosodic factors, such as the quality of the surrounding consonants, the quality of other vowels in the word, and the position of the epenthetic vowel within the word. This last factor has received little attention in the literature. I have identified a number of cases in Italian in which the quality...

This study investigated the effect of language experience on the categorical perception of Cantonese vowel duration distinction. By comparing Cantonese and Mandarin listeners’ performances, we found that: (1) duration change elicited categorical perception in the performance of Cantonese listeners, but not in Mandarin listeners; (2) Cantonese listeners were affected by the vowel quality differe...

this paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of english vowels. two groups of persian efl learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of american english. vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. ladefoged and maddison’s (1996) f1 f2 measurements for american english v...

Previous studies suggested that the synesthesia-like coloured hearing could be found in nonsynesthetic population for both vowel quality and pitch. The vowel-colour and pitch-colour associations were investigated separately so it is unclear whether vowel quality or pitch has a stronger effect on crossmodal colour association, and how they may interact. No study has investigated this phenomenon ...

We investigate the perception of phonemic vowel quantity contrast and its relation to word stress and vowel quality in Slovak, and fill the gap of missing experimental perception data for this language. We observe that both prosodicallydriven undershoot of unstressed vowels and the functional load affect the perception of quantity contrast. Vowel quality plays some role in quantity identificati...

Theories and methods modelling vowel quality in terms of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) have been developed and tested overwhelmingly on North American English (AE) dialects, which raises the question of their generalisability in non-AE dialects and other languages. The present paper examines VISC as an aspect of vowel quality in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Northern Stan...

In literature, there is an extensive and often controversial debate on the primary acoustic and perceptual cues of vowel quality, resulting in two main viewpoints that these cues are contained in either the formants, or, alternatively, in the spectral shape. However, in our understanding, one aspect is highly underestimated: the fact that any spectral representation of vowel-quality is directly...

In the literature, there is an extensive and often controversial debate on the primary acoustic and perceptual cues of vowel quality, resulting in two main viewpoints that these cues are contained in either the formants, or, alternatively, in the spectral shape. However, in our understanding, one aspect is highly underestimated: the fact that any spectral representation of vowel-quality is dire...