Many people with developmental dyslexia have difficulty perceiving stop consonant contrasts as effectively as other people and it has been suggested that this may be due to perceptual limitations of a temporal nature. Accordingly, we predicted that perception of such stimuli by listeners with dyslexia might be improved by stretching them in time-equivalent to speaking slowly. Conversely, their ...

The tongue has been frequently characterized as being composed of several functionally independent articulators. The question of functional regionality within the tongue was examined by quantifying the strength of coupling among four different tongue locations across a large number of consonantal contexts and participants. Tongue behavior during swallowing was also described. Vertical displacem...

The effect of stimulus level on cortical auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by consonant-vowel (CV) contrasts, /ta/, /da/, and /sa/, was investigated. The lowest level at which CVs were discriminated with >95% accuracy was determined for 15 normally hearing adults. ERPs were obtained at 0, 20, and 40 dB SL above this level during active listening. ERP latencies decreased as level i...

Five patients who used a six-channel, continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) cochlear implant were presented vowels, in two experiments, from a large sample of men, women, boys and girls for identification. At issue in the first experiment was whether vowels from one speaker group, i.e., men, were more identifiable than vowels from other speaker groups. At issue in the second experiment was the ...

Five patients who used a six-channel, continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) cochlear implant were presented vowels, in two experiments, from a large sample of men, women, boys, and girls for identification. At issue in the first experiment was whether vowels from one speaker group, i.e., men, were more identifiable than vowels from other speaker groups. At issue in the second experiment was the...

Domain-initial strengthening has primarily been studied for consonants. This paper examines whether vowels also undergo boundary-induced phonetic variation and questions how this effect interacts with phonological contrast in a dense vowel system such as that of French. The labial articulation and the acoustic properties of the 10 French oral vowels /i, e, ɛ, a, y, ø, œ, u, o, ɔ/ are examined i...

The present study examines the acoustic vowel space of Greek and Turkish vowels produced by bilingual speakers. The results are presented for both languages’ vowels production by bilingual speakers, as well as compared with the vowels production by monolingual speakers. It is revealed that the acoustic space of the Greek vowels produced by bilingual speakers is larger than the acoustic space of...

Dialects of Swedish vary in the pronunciation of unstressed /e/ in different phonological environments. In this pilot study, Stockholm Swedish is compared with several Finland Swedish dialects. Stockholm and one Åland dialect lower and back /e/ before [n], while Helsinki and most Nyland dialects lower and back /e/ before [r]. The data provide evidence for the sociolinguistic relevance of unstre...

Recent work has demonstrated that auditory filters recover temporal-envelope cues from speech fine structure when the former were removed by filtering or distortion. This study extended this work by assessing the contribution of recovered envelope cues to consonant perception as a function of the analysis bandwidth, when vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) stimuli were processed in order to keep their ...

Five commonly used methods for determining the onset of voicing of syllable-initial stop consonants were compared. The speech and glottal activity of 16 native speakers of Cantonese with normal voice quality were investigated during the production of consonant vowel (CV) syllables in Cantonese. Syllables consisted of the initial consonants /ph/, /th/, /kh/, /p/, /t/, and /k/ followed by the vow...