Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Italian is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. In contrast, syntactic occurs across word boundaries, affects the initial a in specific contexts, such as presence monosyllabic morpheme before word. This study investigates acoustic correlates gemination, asking if for are similar ...

In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh ‘‘cow’’ /ku:/ ! [tu:], or stopping, e.g., Schaf ‘‘sheep...

This paper presents the experimental results of investigation in a research on the phoneme restoration effects for the case of degraded speech communication. The first experiment examined the role of coarticulation in consonant restoration inside CV syllables. In the second experiment the phonological effects in initial consonant restoration around the words were demonstrated. The third experim...

This is an acoustic study of prosodic effects on segmental durations with reference to syllable structure, stress, focus and tempo in Greek. Disyllabic nonsense words with one, or two, or three consonants in the initial syllable were examined in stressed/unstressed, focused/unfocused and normal/fast tempo productions in a carrier sentence contexts. The results indicate that: (1) syllabic onset ...

We investigate the phonological development of initial consonants and consonant clusters in a pair of fraternal female twins acquiring American English. At age 4 years, 1 month, twin A had achieved a nearly adult phonology; while twin B evidenced a reduced inventory of surface contrasts, due to the multiple effects of substitution, deletion, and coalescence. The relative intelligibility of twin...

The study investigates different factors influencing schwa realization in French: phonological factors, speech style, gender, and socio-professional status. Three large corpora, two of public journalistic speech (ESTER and ETAPE) and one of casual speech (NCCFr) are used. The absence/presence of schwa is automatically decided via forced alignment, which has a successful performance rate of 95%....

In 1913, Anton Pfalz described a specific relation of vowel and consonant sequences for East Middle Bavarian dialects, located in the eastern parts of Austria. According to his observations, a long vowel is always followed by a lenis consonant, and a short vowel is always followed by a fortis consonant. Consequently, vowel duration depends on the quality of the following consonant. Phonetic exa...

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...