Identification functions of 20 initial and 20 final consonants were characterized in 9600 randomly sampled consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) tokens presented in speech-spectrum noise. Because of differences in the response criteria for different consonants, signal detection measures were used to quantify identifiability. Consonant-specific baseline signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were adjusted to p...

In speech rhythm analysis, it is important to localize the perceptual center (P-center) of syllables in order to establish a basis for measuring syllabic duration. P-center research has focused primarily on Germanic languages, for which syllables tend to begin with multiple consonants. In Cantonese, the syllable-initial position contains no more than one consonant, making it less prone to durat...

Japanese is widely recognized as a prototypical pitch-accent language, based on the fact that, given the “accent” location or the lack thereof, the tonal pattern of the entire word is totally predictable. Therefore, unlike tone languages, specification of the tone of each syllable is unnecessary. Consequently, it has been argued that, although Japanese may superficially resemble tone languages,...

Coronal stop deletion in English word-final consonant clusters (CSD), one of the most studied variables in sociolinguistics, has been consistently shown to be affected by the preceding and following phonological context. Previous work has treated a following pause as one type of context, on par with a following consonant or vowel. Looking at deletion rates in a corpus of spontaneous speech, we ...

This paper discusses issues including tongue position, tongue movement space, constraint etc. of Mongolian word-initial consonants. The experimental result shows that word-initial consonant tongue horizontal movement space is constrained by constriction position and is in conformity with the rule that front consonant leads to smaller tongue movement space; higher consonant leads to smaller tong...

The coordination of gestures in consonant clusters differs across languages and hence must be a learned aspect linguistic knowledge. Precisely pinning down the relation used particular language, or for cluster type, has been facilitated by recent research showing that relations structure kinematic variation unique ways. We apply these methods to hitherto under-explored topic, created via vowel ...

Locke (1983), studying world languages, found that some have word-initial clusters, some word-final clusters, and others consonant clusters in both word-initial and wordfinal positions. Considering negative transfer, linguists would claim native speakers of tongues without consonant clusters can have difficulty in phonologically manipulating target items with consonant clusters. Chinese differs...