It is widely claimed that close vowels in Japanese are devoiced when they occur between voiceless consonants. In this paper, voiceless vowels are represented symbolically as [V-] and voiced vowels as [V+]. The patterns of linguopalatal contact during C[V-]C units and the corresponding C[V+]C units are examined using the method of electropalatography (EPG). Our results show that C[V-]C units and...

The well-studied phenomenon of vowel lengthening before tense sonorants in Modern Irish (Ó Siadhail 1989, Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975, Ó Baoill 1979), exemplified in (1), is now well understood as a compensatory process (see for example Ní Chiosain 1991). Tense or long sonorants (L, L', R', N, N', m) trigger vowel lengthening and/or diphthongization. What is not clear about this phenomenon is th...

Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

Abstract In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by segment /t/. However, at right edge, there another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves final /t/ associated to suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final are derived when stem vowel V position suffix, blocking association This right-edge...

In this paper, we present a state-space formulation of a neuralnetwork-based hidden dynamic model of speech whose parameters are trained using an approximate EM algorithm. The training makes use of the results of an off-the-shelf formant tracker (during the vowel segments) to simplify the complex sufficient statistics that would be required in the exact EM algorithm. The trained model, consisti...

Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual ~GLB!, and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /Ä/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not genera...

The English stop voicing contrast is examined in both wordinitial position (via VOT) and word-final position (via the duration of the preceding vowel) in young adult speakers born and brought up in the Shetland Isles. The subjects’ parents were either also from Shetland, from elsewhere in Scotland, or England. All have identical phonemic stop systems, unambiguously so in initial position. The q...

Previous work has demonstrated that normal-hearing individuals use fine-grained phonetic variation, such as formant movement and duration, when recognizing English vowels. The present study investigated whether these cues are used by adult postlingually deafened cochlear implant users, and normal-hearing individuals listening to noise-vocoder simulations of cochlear implant processing. In Exper...

Information stored in short-term memory decays extremely fast compared to the content of long-term memory. The nature of this memory loss being little known (random or systematic), this paper examines the presentation order effect in the light of the neutralization hypothesis, according to which the first vowel in a pair decays toward [@], while retained in short-term memory. Twelve French list...