Japanese natives segment speech into morae. The current study tested whether this extends to perception of geminate consonants: do Japanese natives rely on the moraic obstruent /Q/, and if so, which acoustic feature is perceived to characterize /Q/? Based on an informal interview, we hypothesized that Japanese natives rely on /Q/ that is represented as a silent duration. If so, it should be mor...

Previous studies have shown that the adult speakers experience difficulty in discriminating nonnative phonetic contrasts that are not phonemic in their native language. The present study examined the internal structure of phonetic category representations in adults to seek an explanation for the impact of language experience on phonetic perception. Experiment 1 shows that language experience af...

The effect of a preceding fricative on the perceived place of stop consonant articulation was investigated in a series of experiments. In experiment 1, we preceded synthetic syllables from two [tV]--[kV] continua with fricative noises appropriate to [integral of] or [s] and showed that more velar stops are perceived in the context of [s]. Experiment 1 also demonstrated a decrease in the magnitu...

The present study examines the temporal and spectral characteristics of Greek fricatives (duration and spectral moments, i.e. mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis) as distinctive cues for their place of articulation. The effects of voicing, speaker’s gender and post-fricative vowel on both duration and spectral moments are also investigated. The results indicate that noise duration does not disti...

OBJECTIVES To determine how normal-hearing adults (NHA), normal-hearing children (NHC) and children wearing cochlear implants (CI) differ in the perceptual weight given cues for fricative consonants (having a comparatively long static cue and short transition cue) versus stop consonants (having a comparatively short static cue and long transition cue). METHODS Ten NHA, eleven 5- to 8-year-old...

To minimize transmission bandwidth in speech based communication systems such as telephone systems, narrowband representation of the signal is generally used. This band-limited signal can able to represent the vowel sounds without much distortion, but it is not suitable for representing consonant sounds, mostly fricative consonants ( th /, sh/, / Isl /, xl/ ch, /, etc). Artificial Band Extensio...

This study mainly investigated the predictions of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) on Taiwanese vocational high school EFL learners’ acquisition two English fricative consonants (/s/ and /θ/) by examining relative perceptual difficulty consonants. To achieve this purpose, research questions were devised, a self-designed listening identification test was carried out. A total 43 students fro...

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) is a valuable emerging tool for studying the dynamics of vocal production. Conventional 2D rtMRI typically images the midsagittal plane of the vocal tract, acquiring data from all the important articulators. Dynamic 3D MRI would be a major advance, as it would provide 3D visualization of the vocal tract shaping dynamics, especially for the modeling o...

Hybrid source models for fricative consonants are derived based on aeroacoustic principles of sound generation employing vocal tract area functions obtained from magnetic resonance imaging data of voiced and unvoiced English fricatives. Results based on data from a male and a female subject indicate that a linear source-filter model is fairly adequate for capturing essential spectral characteri...

We present the Tamajaq language and the dictionary we used as main linguistic resource in the two first parts. The third part details the complex morphology of this language. In the part 4 we describe the conversion of the dictionary into electronic form, the inflectional rules we wrote and their implementation in the Nooj software. Finally we present a plan for our future work. 1. The Tamajaq ...