This paper examines the production of perception of three types of phonological boundaries. In the first part, we extended our previous acoustic analysis to confirm that French speakers mark word and syllables boundaries differently in enchaînement sequences. The durational properties of vowels and consonants were compared in 3 boundary conditions: (A) enchaînement (V1C#V2), (B) wordinitial con...

Child productions of two-syllable strong-weak words like baby and cookie are observed to exhibit a wide range of implementations of the medial stop consonant compared to adult productions. Detailed acoustic analysis of these consonants reported here lays the groundwork for prosodic analysis of the role of foot structure in the development of production of bisyllabic words. Acoustic details of t...

We investigate the contribution that lingual gesture delay makes to lenition of postvocalic /r/. This study uses a socially-stratified, audio-ultrasound corpus of Scottish English containing recordings from two sociolects; one with postvocalic /r/ weakening and the other with strengthening. We quantify auditory strength of rhoticity and the timing of the anterior lingual gesture relative to the...

This study investigates how beginning learners of Japanese language (L2 Japanese) develop the durational features of an intervocalic consonant. Acoustic analyses were conducted on speech data collected from Australian learners of Japanese over a sixteen month period at the early stages of learning. The durations of the intervocalic consonant, and the component durations, voice onset time (VOT) ...

Syllable fusion is a Hong Kong Cantonese connected speech process, whereby edges of syllables are obscured by consonant lenition or deletion, and vowel reduction. More extreme fusion can simplify contour tones and merge the qualities of vowels that would be separated by an onset or coda consonant at more normal degrees of disjuncture between words. This paper investigates the influence of speec...

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of place of articulation on voice onset time (VOT) of Persian initial plosive productions for Iranian cleft palate children. Fifteen cleft palate children and twenty children born without cleft were asked to produce seven words in CVC syllabic pattern. The initial consonant of the syllable was a plosive; the vowel was the close, front vowel /i...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...

Recent studies have shown that talkers implicitly imitate/accommodate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech [1, 2]. However, it has also been shown that this phonetic imitation effect is not an automatic process [3, 4]: in [3], the artificially lengthened VOT on /p/ was imitated in a non-shadowing task, while shortened VOT (which could jeopardize phonemic contrast) was not imitated, ...

This paper presents the first description of vowel devoicing in Quechua. The characteristics of the process as well as the environments most conducive to its occurrence are reported based on an analysis of 4062 vowels extracted from interviews with 16 speakers of the Cusco Collao dialect. Patterns of Quechua vowel devoicing appear to be generally consistent with the gestural overlap model that ...