Introduction: Aging reduces the ability to understand speech in noise. Hearing rehabilitation is one of the ways to help older people communicate effectively. This study aimed to investigate the effect of vowel auditory training on the improvement of speech-in-noise (SIN) perception among elderly listeners.   Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 36 elderly ...

This study examined the impact of phonetic training on English lexical schwa vowel in primary school learners (aged 12) of English as a foreign language in Spain. Students’ perceptual awareness on the occurrence of schwa in unstressed position in English was tested in three groups: i) a group which underwent auditory discrimination and identification practice, ii) a group ...

This paper investigates if individuals with amusia show deficits in the identification and discrimination of Mandarin vowels, with the aim of exploring whether the deficiency of the amusics lies in the acoustic processing of frequency, or in pitch processing. The results showed that the amusics performed comparably as the controls in vowel identification. For discrimination, both groups exhibit...

Formant bandwidth is known to have little effect on vowel quality. This paper shows that it has a strong effect on mutual masking between vowels. Subjects presented with stimuli consisting of pairs of synthetic vowels were requested to report one or two vowels for each stimulus. Identification rates were calculated independently for both vowels in the stimulus. Vowels had either the same or dif...

In spoken word recognition, one of the crucial point is to identify the vowel phonemes. Vowel phonemes are used to combine two or more consonant phonemes in most of the words spoken, and the meaning of the words changes with the change of vowels. Therefore, in order to recognize a word, identification of vowel phoneme is as important as the identification of constituent consonant phonemes. This...

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that listeners would modify perceptual strategies for phonetic identification if the spectrum of a speech signal was degraded. The contrasts between tense and lax vowels and between word-final s/z were selected because of the primacy of spectral cues and redundancy of temporal cues used in normal listening situations. In the first experiment...

Introduction Segregation phenomena are often studied using the "double-vowel" identification task: subjects are presented with stimuli containing two vowels, and requested to identify both of them [1]. The number of trials on which both vowels are correctly identified (combinationcorrect score) is used as a measure of segregation. This technique has several drawbacks: a) The task is often too e...

Subjects identified concurrent synthetic vowel pairs that differed in relative amplitude and fundamental frequency (F0). Subjects were allowed to report one or two vowels for each stimulus, rather than forced to report two vowels as was the case in previously reported experiments of the same type. At all relative amplitudes, identification was better at a fundamental frequency difference (DF0) ...