Do speakers’ accents change from day to day? This paper examines this question through the lens of voice onset time (VOT). We examine whether VOT within individual speakers shows time dependence—daily fluctuations, longer-term time trends, or both—by examining spontaneous speech from 11 English speakers on three months of the reality TV show Big Brother UK. We build statistical models of time d...

This study investigates durational and spectral variation in syllable-onset /l/s dependent on voicing in the coda. 1560 pairs of (C)lVC monosyllables differing in the voicing of the final stop were read by 4 British English speakers. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless codas, and darker (for 3 speakers) as measured by F2 frequency and spectral centre of gravity. Differences due to...

Assimilatory phonetic drift in L1 has been shown to occur in early second language learners when separate L2 categories have not been established. The direction and likelihood of drift is affected by degree of L1:L2 difference [2], and the need to maintain L1 distinctions [10]. We assessed the impact of explicit L2 phonetic training on L1:L2 interaction when novel L2 sounds could lead to a more...

In this work we propose a time domain technique to estimate an all-pole model based on the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) using a warped short time frequency axis such as the Mel scale. The use of the MVDR eliminates the overemphasis of harmonic peaks typically seen in medium and high pitched voiced speech when spectral estimation is based on linear prediction (LP). Moreover, w...

Cross-modal semantic priming and phoneme monitoring experiments investigated processing of word-final nonreleased stop consonants (e.g., kit may be pronounced /kit/ or /ki/), which are common phonological variants in American English. Both voiced /d/ and voiceless /t/ segments were presented in release and no-release versions. A cross-modal semantic priming task (Experiment 1) showed comparable...

Coarticulation is an important phenomenon that affects the realization of phonetic segments in fluent speech. The effects of coarticulation are prominent in both spectral and temporal domains. Various effects of phonetic contexts on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments have been previously reported based on individual distinctive features (e.g., voiced stops lengthen and unvoiced stop...

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perc...

Most previous works on acoustic cues for the voicedvoiceless distinction of initial stops have focused on non-tonal languages such as English. The present study seeks to determine some possible cues for voicing perception of initial stops in a tonal language—Shanghainese. Perceptual experiments were conducted using stimuli which were created based on natural sounds in the initial position and t...

The impact of two different impostor modelling techniques on the performance of a Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs)-based text-independent speaker verification system is studied. Depending on the technique used for background codebook construction, two versions of the system are obtained: with one universal background codebook, common to all authorized speakers, and with an individual speake...

This study investigates durational and spectral variation in syllable-onset /l/s dependent on voicing in the coda. 1560 pairs of (C)lVC monosyllables differing in the voicing of the final stop were read by 4 British English speakers. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless codas, and darker (for 3 speakers) as measured by F2 frequency and spectral centre of gravity. Differences due to...