The most common complaint of older hearing impaired (OHI) listeners is difficulty understanding speech in the presence of noise. However, tests of consonant-identification and sentence reception threshold (SeRT) provide different perspectives on the magnitude of impairment. Here we quantified speech perception difficulties in 24 OHI listeners in unaided and aided conditions by analyzing (1) con...

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of three acoustic modifications derived from clear speech for improving consonant recognition by young and elderly normal-hearing subjects. Percent-correct nonsense syllable recognition was measured for four stimulus sets: unmodified stimuli; stimuli with consonant duration increased by 100%; stimuli with consonant-vowel ratio increased b...

Investigation of spontaneous speech corpora has shown that vowel devoicing in Japanese is a statistical phenomena. However, factors behind vowel devoicing have not been fully studied. In addition, there have been no studies that specifically examined pre-pausal vowel devoicing. In this paper, we investigate vowel devoicing in the pre-pausal position, in particular, vowel devoicing occurring at ...

Six paralinguistic information types uttered by three subjects were examined. Considerable changes were observed in duration, pitch, vowel formant, and voice quality. These findings require some reconsideration of the problems in the phrase phonology of Japanese like mora-based timing and phrase-initial pitch movement. On the other hand, lexically specified phonological features were more robus...

The aim of the study was to investigate gender-dependent differences in the realization of German glottalized vowel onsets. Laryngographic data of semi-spontaneous speech were collected from four male and four female speakers of Standard German. Measurements of relative vocal fold contact duration were carried out including glottalized vowel onsets as well as non-glottalized controls. The resul...

We examined the glottal opening pattern during devoicing environment in Japanese, with respect to the factors that facilitate or suppress devoicing. The factors include consonantal environment, dialects, speech rate, consecutive devoicing environment and phrase final position. The results indicated that glottal opening patterns are twofold: a single phaseand a double phase opening for /CVC/. On...

The distribution of geminate obstruents in Japanese loanwords appears very complex. Some consonants are more prone to gemination than others, on the one hand, and one and the same consonant is more likely to geminate in some phonological contexts than in others, on the other hand. This paper tackles these problems by considering the relationship between consonant gemination in native words and ...

The present study explores the issue of the use of phonetic specificity in the process of learning new words at 20 months of age. The procedure used follows Nazzi and Gopnik [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2001). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: When does language become a tool for categorization? Cognition, 80, B11-B20]. Infants were first presented with triads of perceptually dissimil...

this research aims to explore the observance of syllable contact law (scl) in persian simple words. to achieve this aim, 4661 contacts were extracted from 9553 simple polysyllabic words. results show that in 45% of the syllable boundaries the sonority drops from the coda of the first syllable to the onset of the next one. also in 68% of the consonant contacts in pure persian words scl is observ...