In cases of articulatory conflict, gestures involved in preserving phonemic distinctiveness are generally favored over gestures that do not. Here, an apparent exception to the phonemic distinctiveness preservation hypothesis is shown to in fact conform to it: in English, the larynx is lowered before voiced stops to maintain voicing distinctiveness, but the larynx is raised during high vowels, a...

We estimated the perceptual entropy rate of the phonemes of American English and found that the upper limit of the perceptual entropy of voiced phonemes is approximately 1.4 bit/sample, whereas the perceptual entropy of unvoiced phonemes is approximately 0.9 bit/sample. Results indicate that a simple voiced/unvoiced classi cation is suboptimal when trying to minimize bit rate. We used two di er...

All Dutch dialects — or, more generally, all West-Germanic dialects except English — display the effects of a process called final devoicing (FD), illustrated in (1) for standard Dutch: an underlyingly voiced obstruent devoices when it occurs at the end of a syllable. That the obstruent is underlyingly voiced can be seen in other morphological contexts, where it does not end the syllable. Thus ...

This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of voicing in English fricative consonants produced by anterior aphasics and the effects of phonetic context on these characteristics. Three patients produced voiced and voiceless fricative-vowel syllables in isolation, following a voiced velar stop, and following a voiceless velar stop. Acoustic analyses were conducted of the amplitude and p...

This work reports cross-language differences in the voicing of initial voiced stops, and in the use of active maneuvers to achieve closure voicing, using multiparametric aerodynamic data. Oral pressure, oral and nasal flow, and acoustic data were obtained for utterance-initial /b d p t m/ for 10 speakers of Spanish, 6 speakers of French and 5 speakers of English. Voiced stops were classified as...

Abstract Voicing is an important phonetic characteristic of speech. Each phoneme belongs to a group either voiced or unvoiced sounds. We investigated and compared the performance five algorithms widely used estimate speech voicing. All were implemented in Matlab tested on both short consonants continuous Phonetically paired (voiced vs unvoiced) parts read from audio books experiments. The tuned...

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...

This letter focuses on the automatic estimation of the first subglottal resonance (Sg1). A database comprising speech and subglottal data of native American English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers was used for the analysis. Data from 11 speakers (five males and six females) were used to derive an empirical relation among the first formant frequency, fundamental frequency, and Sg...

UNLABELLED Vowel durations following the production of voiced and voiceless stop consonants produced during simultaneous communication (SC) were investigated by recording sign language users during SC and speech alone (SA). Under natural speaking conditions, or speaking alone (SA), vowels following voiced stop consonants are longer in duration than vowels following voiceless stops. Although the...