This thesis studies and interprets the -entory of acoustic events associated with the changing vocal-tract configurations .:at characterize fricatives preceding vowels. Theoretical considerations of the articulatory, aerodynamic and acoustic aspects of the production of fricatives provide the foundation for interpreting the acoustic data. Fricative characteristics are considered with respect to...

Previous research in speech perception has shown that category information affects the discrimination of consonants to a greater extent than vowels. However, there has been little electrophysiological work on the perception of fricative sounds, which are informative for this contrast as they share properties with both consonants and vowels. In the current study we address the relative contribut...

This study describes the production of sibilant fricatives /s/ and /∫/, comparing Scottish English speaking preadolescent children with adults. The materials were the sequences /əCa/ and /əCi/ produced by 15 adults and 15 children aged between 10 and 12 years old. Quantitative analyses were carried out on both spectral information and on ultrasound imaging data on tongue shape, taken from nine ...

This study presents an analysis of synchronic metathesis in the Saraiki language based on Optimality Theory (OT) approach. It is limited to voiced laryngeal fricative (/ɦ/). Only phonemes are targets /ɦ/ (resulting breathy consonants), while voiceless plosives incompatible with this process. Metathesized and non-metathesized forms both occur Saraiki. They realized informal formal speech styles,...

This study examines F0 influence on perception of Korean initial lax, aspirated, and tense consonants by Japanese learners of the Korean language. Stimuli consisted of monosyllabic sounds (/ta, tsa, ta, tsa/) with interchanged F0s, including lax and aspirated consonants. Results from recognition testing of the stimuli found that both beginning and advanced learners paid less attention to stimul...

According to sound symbolism theory, individual sounds or clusters of sounds can convey meaning. To examine the role of sound symbolic effects on processing and memory for nonwords, we developed a novel set of 100 nonwords to convey largeness (nonwords containing plosive consonants and back vowels) and smallness (nonwords containing fricative consonants and front vowels). In Experiments 1A and ...

Speech errors are known to exhibit an intrusion bias in that segments are added rather than deleted; also, a shared final consonant can cause an interaction of the initial consonants. A principled connection between these two phenomena has been drawn in a gestural account of errors: Articulatory measures revealed a preponderance of errors in which both the target and intruding gesture are co-pr...