The factors that influence native English speakers to make a consonant ambisyllabic is explored in 627 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word, and later in the experiment, bit as the second. About 20% of the responses were ambisyllabic. For words such as rabbit with a single intervocalic consonant, ...

Recent research with skilled adult readers has consistently revealed an advantage of consonants over vowels in visual-word recognition (i.e., the so-called "consonant bias"). Nevertheless, little is known about how early in development the consonant bias emerges. This work aims to address this issue by studying the relative contribution of consonants and vowels at the early stages of visual-wor...

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...

Dysarthria is a speech motor disorder usually resulting in a substantive decrease in speech intelligibility by the general population. In this study, we have significantly improved the intelligibility of dysarthric vowels of one speaker from 48% to 54%, as evaluated by a vowel identification task using 64 CVC stimuli judged by 24 listeners. Improvement was obtained by transforming the vowels of...

Portions of the procedure and analysis of the wide-band noise masking experiment in Miller-Nicely’s 1955 JASA paper (MN55) was repeated and a new set of data was collected in 2005. This classic paper is a commonly referenced work in which confusion matrices were collected for a set of consonant-vowels (CVs). From an analysis of the original results, they made conclusions about the robustness of...

Correspondence between the glottal opening gesture pattern and vowel devoicing in Japanese was examined using PGG with special reference to the pattern of glottal gesture overlap and blending into the neighboring vowel. The results showed that most of the tokens demonstrated either a single glottal opening pattern with a devoiced vowel, or a double glottal opening with a voiced vowel during /Ci...