Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...

Using cross-linguistic evidence from the relationship of epenthetic vowel choice to the vowel system of a given language, this paper proposes a set of context-free markedness constraints on vowel features. Universally ranked constraints yield the result that front vowels are more marked than back and that round vowels are marked; languages may vary in how they rank the markedness of low and non...

This article is concerned with the acoustic correlates that characterize stress and accent in Catalan and Spanish. We analyzed four acoustic correlates of stress (syllable duration, vowel quality, overall intensity, and spectral balance) in four conditions, namely, stressed and unstressed syllables in both accented and unaccented environments. This allowed us to examine the relative strength of...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of age and gender on selected vocal fold vibratory behaviors during vowel prolongation and connected speech using electroglottography (EGG). Forty-six young and older individuals (23 males and 23 females) with normal voices participated in this study. EGG parameters including fundamental frequency and contact quotient were measured during...

It is uncertain from previous research to what extent the perceptual system retains plasticity after attunement to the native language (L1) sound system. This study evaluated second-language (L2) vowel discrimination by individuals who began learning the L2 as children ("early learners"). Experiment 1 identified procedures that lowered discrimination scores for foreign vowel contrasts in an AXB...

Perceived pitch differences between high vs. low vowels with identical F0 have been reported in the literature. On the speech production side, in German a specific phenomenon is found: Tense and lax vowels differ in their tongue height but tend to have a similar F0. On the speech perception side, our aim was to test whether German listeners judge the tongue height or real F0 of tense and lax vo...

This study compares F1 and F2 for the vowels of the five and six peripheral vowel systems of four minor dialects of Catalan (Felanitxer, Gironı́, Sitgetà, Rossellonès), with those of the seven peripheral vowel systems of the major dialects those minor dialects belong to (Majorcan, Eastern). Results indicate that most mid vowel pairs subjected to neutralization may be characterized as near-merger...

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...

In Japanese, high vowels may devoice between two unvoiced obstruents (k[u̥]kaku 'division', k[i̥]kaku 'plan'). Recent studies have shown that the devoicing of non-high vowels (k[ḁ]karu 'take', k[e̥]ta 'digit, k[o̥]tae 'answer') may also occur. This paper evaluates the role of vowel duration and vocal folds gestures involved in vowel devoicing in Japanese. An experiment using an electroglottograph (...

Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of segmental duration used in the Bell Labs Japanese TTS system. We describe the constraints on vowel devoicing, and effects of factors such as phone identity, surrounding phone identities, accentuation, syllabic structure, and phrasal position on the duration of...