This study explored whether an identity-matching-based stimulus equivalence procedure could be used to teach vowel and consonant stimulus classes to 2 adolescent females with moderate mental retardation. Delayed match-to-sample trials presented a compound sample stimulus consisting of printed letters and a spoken word ("vowel" or "consonant"). The correct comparison stimulus matched only one of...

This paper presents an unsupervised approach to Automatic Language Identification (ALI) based on vowel system modeling. Each language vowel system is modeled by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) trained with automatically detected vowels. Since this detection is unsupervised and language independent, no labeled data are required. GMMs are initialized using an efficient data-driven variant of the L...

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) produces deficits in speech comprehension in noise that primarily are due to impairments in identifying consonants. Here, we describe the California Syllable Test (CaST) that quantifies the identification of common American English consonants. In experiment I, 16 young subjects with normal hearing identified 720 consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables in thre...

Theories on the mechanisms of phoneme identification generally involve only the actual segment and the transitions to and from neighbouring segments. In a l istening experiment we tested the importance for vowel and consonant identification of the presence of speech segments beyond the transition parts. The resu lts clearly show that identification continues to improve when speech is added beyo...

The purpese of the experiments reported was to establish a scale of hearing thresholds and intelligibility thresholds for Croatian sounds. The test material for the experiments consisted of all possible CV-type syllables. The result of the experiments show that the hearing thresholds depend on the vocalic syllable nucleus. The paradox is that the intelligibility thresholds for consonants are no...

This study was designed to examine the role of duration in vowel perception by testing listeners on the identification of CVC syllables generated at different durations. Test signals consisted of synthesized versions of 300 utterances selected from a large, multitalker database of /hVd/ syllables [Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3099-3111 (1995)]. Four versions of each utterance wer...

The influence of vibrato on vowel identification i s studied in synthesized vowel sounds with fundamental frequencies between 300 and 1000 Hz. Phonetically trained subjects were asked to identify these stimuli presented with and without vibrato a s any of 12 Swedish long vowels. Small and occasional effects a r e observed on the mean formant frequencies and the scatter between the responses. Ho...

OBJECTIVES To determine the influence of hearing loss on perception of vowel slices. METHODS Fourteen listeners aged 20-27 participated; ten (6 males) had hearing within normal limits and four (3 males) had moderate-severe sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Stimuli were six naturally-produced words consisting of the vowels /i a u æ ɛ ʌ/ in a /b V b/ context. Each word was presented as a whole...