An experiment investigated the effects of amplitude ratio (-35 to 35 dB in 10-dB steps) and fundamental frequency difference (0%, 3%, 6%, and 12%) on the identification of pairs of concurrent synthetic vowels. Vowels as weak as -25 dB relative to their competitor were easier to identify in the presence of a fundamental frequency difference (delta F0). Vowels as weak as -35 dB were not. Identifi...

This study is concerned with the perceptual relevance of regressive vowel harmony in French. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment showed that acoustic variations in a non-final vowel depending on the final vowel can be detected by listeners. The second experiment revealed that vowel harmony can facilitate the identification of the final vowel. Implications for current models of ...

Previous studies have shown that some English vowel contrasts remain difficult for English learners to perceive. This study investigated three potential factors affecting vowel perception: cross-language vowel systems, spectral distance, and language proficiency, for the discrimination and identification of English /ɪ/-/ε/, /ε/-/æ/, /ʊ/-/ʌ/, and /ʌ/-/ɒ/ contrasts in four groups of listeners: L1...

This project focused on the individual differences underlying observed variability in temporal processing among older listeners. Four measures of vowel temporal-order identification were completed by young (N=35; 18-31 years) and older (N=151; 60-88 years) listeners. Experiments used forced-choice, constant-stimuli methods to determine the smallest stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between brief ...

The question of vowel intelligibility as a function of F0 is still a matter of debate. Above all concerning vowel sounds produced at F0s exceeding vowel related statistical F1 in citation-form words (‘oversinging’ F1), it is unclear whether vowel category perception inevitably shifts towards the neighboring category with a higher F1 or can be maintained in such cases. In this study, we tested l...

This paper describes three cross-language ASR experiments which use hidden Markov modelling. The first one shows that consonant identification improves when vowel transitions are used. In particular, the consonants’ place of articulation is identified better, because the vowel transitions contain formant trajectories which depend on the consonant’s place of articulation. The second experiment c...

This study aims to quantify the relative contributions of phonetic categories and acoustic detail on phonotactically induced perceptual vowel epenthesis in Japanese listeners. A vowel identification task tested whether a vowel was perceived within illegal consonant clusters and, if so, which vowel was heard. Cross-spliced stimuli were used in which vowel coarticulation present in the cluster di...