Do speakers’ accents change from day to day? This paper examines this question through the lens of voice onset time (VOT). We examine whether VOT within individual speakers shows time dependence—daily fluctuations, longer-term time trends, or both—by examining spontaneous speech from 11 English speakers on three months of the reality TV show Big Brother UK. We build statistical models of time d...

This study examines methods for recognizing different classes of phones from accented speech based on voice onset time (VOT). These methods are tested on data from the Tball corpus of Los Angeles-area elementary school children [1]. The methods proposed and tested are: 1) to train models based on standard English VOT contrasts and then extract the VOT characteristics of the phones by measuring ...

Mastering spatial and temporal co-ordination in speech production is a challenge for children. Voice onset time (VOT) reflects timing in speech. The objective was to study VOT in Swedish children with a diagnosed phonological impairment and compare results with normative data. Thus 38 children, aged 4-11 years, in three age-groups were audio-recorded when producing minimal pairs with the plosiv...

The sensitivity of the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex to visual word processing has triggered a considerable debate about the role of this region in reading. One popular view is that the left vOT underlies the perceptual expertise needed for rapid skilled reading. Because skilled reading breaks down when words are presented in a visually unfamiliar format, we tested this hypothesis...

This study examined production and perception of the contrast between /t/-/d/ by subjects differing in native language and age. Acoustic analysis revealed that native speakers of English realized word-initial /t/ with significantly longer VOT values (approximately 85 ms) than native speakers of Spanish (approximately 19 ms). Native English and Spanish adults realized /t/ with VOT values that we...

Research on the phonetics of code-switching has focused on voice onset time (VOT) and has yielded mixed results regarding cross-language interaction, possibly due to differences in data used (scripted vs. spontaneous speech) and populations examined (L1 vs. L2 dominant, early vs. late bilinguals). Here VOT was measured in a corpus of spontaneous code-switching speech elicited from a homogeneous...

This study investigates the influence of cue primacy on spontaneous speech imitation by speakers of Seoul Korean. In Seoul Korean, at least two distinct acoustic cues, stop VOT and f0 of the post-stop vowel, differentiate aspirated stops from other phonation types. Previous studies have shown that English speakers imitate extended VOTs of voiceless stops both in immediate shadowing [12] and del...

Talkers differ in phonetic properties of speech. One such property is voice-onset-time (VOT), an important marker of the voicing contrast in English stop consonants. Research has shown that VOT is affected by speaking rate: for any given talker, VOT increases as rate slows. The current work examines whether this contextual influence varies across talkers. Many tokens of /ti/ (Experiment 1) or /...

Childhood apraxia of speech(CAS) is considered as an impairment of purposeful speech movements and is generally defined as a disorder of motor planning or motor programming. There have been a variety of studies about CAS and the diagnostic criteria were set up in English-speaking countries, but studies about diagnostic criteria of CAS for Korean speakers are needed. The purpose of the study was...

We examine the dynamics of VOT in Polish stops under lexical stress and focus. We elicit real Polish words containing voiced and voiceless stop+/a/ syllables in primary, secondary and unstressed, as well as focus positions. We also correlate VOT with speech rate estimated on the basis of equisyllabic word length. Our results show that the relationships between prosody and VOT are consistent wit...