In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

Phonetic transcriptions of spoken language corpora are not an exact written reproduction of the speech signal. They are influenced by a variety of factors such as the transcriber s native categorical perception. What remains unexplored is to what extent variation of perception within the same language exerts any influence on phonetic transcriptions. We report a case study of the labelling of vo...

The paper studies the impact of intrinsic vowel duration on category perception in boundary conditions by examining the short vs. long category boundary perception in Estonian. Since the intrinsic duration of a close vowel /i/ is about 10-15 ms shorter than that of an open vowel /a/, we hypothesize that the short vs. long category boundary in /i/ occurs at a shorter duration than in the case of...

In Japanese, high vowels may devoice between two unvoiced obstruents (k[u̥]kaku 'division', k[i̥]kaku 'plan'). Recent studies have shown that the devoicing of non-high vowels (k[ḁ]karu 'take', k[e̥]ta 'digit, k[o̥]tae 'answer') may also occur. This paper evaluates the role of vowel duration and vocal folds gestures involved in vowel devoicing in Japanese. An experiment using an electroglottograph (...

In this paper, we developed a vowel sound accuracy checking system for educational purpose in learning foreign language. We employed an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) based phoneme segmentation algorithm, and used the 1st and 2nd formants as a measure of the vowel sound quality. We tested this system for several speakers and concluded that it produces reliable results for educational purpose.

This study uses the Nemours Database of Dysarthric Speech and the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech to look into differences in the way vowel quality correlates with intrinsic duration in typical and non-typical populations. Results based on speech material from ten dysarthric subjects indicate that intrinsic vowel duration may indeed play a role as a parameter for acoustic classification.

This paper compares ten vowels sounds across gender and accent. Each formant for each vowel was analysed individually across data sets, but no comparison was drawn directly between the formant relationship within each vowel. The objective here was to examine the formants individually across gender and accent to establish a method for transforming vowel quality in a rule-based synthesis system a...

Past research has shown that sound sequences not permitted in our native language may be distorted by our perceptual system. A well-documented example is vowel epenthesis, a phenomenon by which listeners hallucinate non-existent vowels within illegal consonantal sequences. As reported in previous work, this occurs for instance in Japanese (JP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), languages for which ...

Perceptual and acoustic spaces obtained using MDS and PCA, respectively, for a set of Spanish vowels uttered in various fricative contexts are compared. Acoustic cues to vowel quality were studied through examination of the weights given by PCA to specific spectral regions. The acoustic space formed by the first two formant frequencies was also evaluated. The results show that MDS has serious d...