Recent applications of the hierarchical theory of the syllable to the development of explicit speech segmentation are critically examined. One particular prediction, that an initial consonant is more easily isolated when it constitutes the complete onset of a syllable than when it is part of a cluster onset, was tested on children with grade levels ranging from kindergarten to second grade. At ...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to describe the growth of children's segmentation and representation of consonant blends in the kindergarten year and to evaluate the extent to which linguistic features influence segmentation and representation of consonant blends. Specifically, the roles of word position (initial blends, final blends), class of blends, homorganicity, and nasality were con...

The study investigates different factors influencing schwa realization in French: phonological factors, speech style, gender, and socio-professional status. Three large corpora, two of public journalistic speech (ESTER and ETAPE) and one of casual speech (NCCFr) are used. The absence/presence of schwa is automatically decided via forced alignment, which has a successful performance rate of 95%....

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,...

The bursts and voiced formant transitions are well known as separate cues to the place of articulation of initial stop consonant. The Vietnamese presents three final voiceless stop consonants /p, t, k/ without bursts. It is an opportunity to study these final stop consonants and to compare their characteristics with those of the corresponding initial stop consonants. This paper analyses these f...

Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant–vowel–consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gak/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly...

Abstract. This phonological analysis investigated the production of English consonant sounds produced by Balinese EFL students’ who speak an idiosyncratic native language as main phenomena and examined rules represented descriptively qualitatively. The data were gathered through digital recording observed identifying pronunciation note taking technique. study was supported theories regarding pr...