This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on preceding vowel is important signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The vowel-consonant monosyllabic words Cantonese represents a testing case for ...

The idea of the consonant duration relative to the vowel duration as a cue to voicing of postvocalic consonants is almost three decades old. Port and Dalby (1982) offer what they believeto be convincing support for such a view. We argue that the acceptance of this idea is premature and probably incorrect. In every instance that the concept of consonant! vowel (C/V) ratio is contrasted with an a...

The objective was to determine the effects of a frequency-lowering algorithm (frequency composition, Fcomp) on consonant identification, word-final /s, z/ detection, the intelligibility of sentences in noise, and subjective benefit, for people with high-frequency hearing loss, including people with dead regions (DRs) in the cochlea. A single-blind randomized crossover design was used. Performan...

Intelligibility of conversationally produced speech for normal hearing listeners was studied for three male and three female talkers. Four typical listening environments were used. These simulated a quiet living room, a classroom, and social events in two settings with different reverberation characteristics. For each talker, overall intelligibility and intelligibility for vowels, consonant voi...

Two types of phonological variation in Dutch, resulting from optional rules, are schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion. In a lexical decision experiment it was investigated whether the phonological variants were processed similarly to the standard forms. It was found that the two types of variation patterned differently. Words with schwa epenthesis were processed faster and more accurately than t...

Pronunciation variation is under-studied in infant-directed speech, particularly for consonants. Regressive place assimilation involves a word-final alveolar stop taking the place of articulation of a following word-initial consonant. We investigated pronunciation variation in word-final alveolar stop consonants in storybooks read by forty-eight mothers in adult-directed or infant-directed styl...

Studies of English and German find that children tend to acquire word-final consonant clusters before word-initial consonant clusters. This order of acquisition is generally attributed to articulatory, frequency and/or morphological factors. This contrasts with recent experimental findings from French, where two-year-olds were better at producing word-initial than word-final clusters (Demuth & ...