The improvement of identification accuracy of concurrent vowels with differences in fundamental frequency (delta F0) is usually attributed to mechanisms that exploit harmonic structure. To decide whether identification is aided primarily by selecting the target vowel on the basis of its harmonic structure ("harmonic enhancement") or removing the interfering vowel on the basis of its harmonic st...

We investigated the plasticity of vowel categories in a perceptual learning paradigm in which listeners are encouraged to use lexical knowledge to adjust their interpretation of ambiguous speech sounds. We tested whether this kind of learning occurs for vowels, and whether it generalises to the perception of other vowels. In Experiments 1 and 2, Dutch listeners were exposed during a lexical dec...

Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

In this study we examined the interaction of fundamental frequency (Fo) differences and binaural separation cues on the identification accuracy and judgments of the relative pitches of concurrent vowel pairs. On each pitch ranking trial listeners were told which vowels were presented and were asked simply to indicate which vowel was on the higher pitch. The first vowel had an FO near 140 Hz and...

Although recent evidence reconfirmed the importance of spectral peak frequencies in vowel identification [Kiefte and Kluender (2005). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 1395-1404], the role of formant amplitude in perception remains somewhat controversial. Although several studies have demonstrated a relationship between vowel perception and formant amplitude, this effect may be a result of basic auditor...

Previous studies have shown that concurrent vowel identification improves with increasing temporal onset asynchrony of the vowels, even if the vowels have the same fundamental frequency. The current study investigated the possible underlying neural processing involved in concurrent vowel perception. The individual vowel stimuli from a previously published study were used as inputs for a phenome...

This paper investigates the effect of vowel quality on the perception of coda nasals in Southern Min. The perceptual confusion experiment revealed that /m/ is the most confusable coda nasal, followed by /ŋ/ and then /n/. The high front vowel /i/ resulted in more misidentification of following coda nasals than mid vowel /ə/ and low vowel /a/. Within the same vowel context, higher formant frequen...

This paper presents a method for segregating and recognizing concurrent vowels based on the amplitude modulation spectrum. Vowel segregation is accomplished by F0guided grouping of harmonic components encoded in the amplitude modulation spectrum while vowel recognition is achieved by classifying the segregated vowel spectrum. Main features of the method are (1) the reassigned technique is emplo...