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...

BACKGROUND Studies addressing the identification of sung vowels concern mainly the effect of the fundamental frequency (f0) and conclude that correct vowel identification decreases with increasing pitch. In one experiment, the impact of consonantal environment on the intelligibility of the vowels in high-pitched singing was also studied. The results of that experiment showed positive effect of ...

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...

The present study will focus on occurrence of fully voiced, devoiced and elided high vowels in Japanese. High vowels elision in Japanese is supported by clear acoustic evidences, even though it is not globally accepted by scholars in the field. Elided vowels, hence, are considered here to have their own status. Moreover, this study is conceived in order to state differences and analogies among ...

Sequences of more than two identical vowels across word boundaries can occasionally be found in Japanese speech. Our previous study (Kakehi and Hirose, 1998) investigated how hearers perceive such vowel sequences. We used isolated sentences as test materials, provided that the duration of such vowel sequences increases in proportion to the number of morae. We found that hearers can detect the n...

The present study will focus on the perception by the native speakers of elided high vowels in Japanese and of deleted sounds in spontaneous speech. Study of mother tongues perception of the said phenomenon may serve as a capstone toward the acceptance of elided vowels in Japanese. It is a common belief among scholars that vowel elision may interfere with words comprehension, for the missing vo...

In same-different discrimination tasks employing isolated vowel sounds, subjects often give significantly more "different" responses to one order of two stimuli than to the other order. Cowan and Morse [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 500-507 (1986)] proposed a neutralization hypothesis to account for such effects: The first vowel in a pair is assumed to change its quality in memory in the direction of...

The paper presents a simple algorithm to cull short phrases of interest spoken in a long recorded speech. Listening to a long and boring recording of a suspect who is being wiretapped may irk intelligence investigator if it does not contain any speech segment of interest. It would be much useful if first a preliminary test is run to see if the recorded speech does contain phrases of interest wh...