In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners ́ responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and...

Recent studies of spoken Standard Dutch support an ongoing change in the phonetic quality of the diphthong /EI/ [1, 2]. However, there is a need for broader analyses and larger data sets. Here, we took Dutch vowel variants of 44 speakers from a spoken Dutch speech corpus, the CGN [3]. The vowels were measured and compared on the basis of 15.000 vowel segments, consisting of productions of /EI/,...

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...

This paper presents an approach to predicting vowel quality in vocal music performances, based on common acoustic features (mainly MFCCs). Rather than performing classification, we use linear regression to project spoken or sung vowels into a continuous articulatory space: the IPA Vowel Chart. We introduce a real-time on-line visualisation tool, the Vowel Worm, which builds upon the resulting m...

In this study vowels in /CVC/ environments are compared with steady state vowels to investigate the perceived vowel quality change caused by undershoot. This study uses a perceptual task, whereby listeners match constant /CVC/ stimuli of /bVb/ or /dVd/ to variable /#V#/ stimuli, using a schematic grid on a PC screen. The grid represents an acoustic vowel diagram, and the subjects change the F1/...

Kera (a Chadic language) has 6 vowels, 3 of which have +/-ATR allophones. [+ATR] vowels appear in non-heads of feet and [-ATR] vowels in heads and elsewhere. This binary classification is sufficient until we examine the acoustic measurements of F1, F2 and duration in footed and non-footed syllables. These results suggest that the variation in quality relates to the duration of the vowel rather ...

Across a variety of languages, phonation type and vocal-tract shape systematically covary in vowel production. Breathy phonation tends to accompany vowels produced with a raised tongue body and/or advanced tongue root. A potential explanation for this regularity, based on a hypothesized interaction between the acoustic effects of vocal-tract shape and phonation type, is evaluated. It is suggest...

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come ma...

This study provides an acoustic phonetic analysis of some of the vowels in an endangered language with little phonetic documentation, Scottish Gaelic. It tests previous mainly impressionistic analyses which claim Scottish Gaelic has phonemic vowel length, and contrasts four high back vowels /u  o /. Results suggest four vowels are indeed contrasted, and that phonemic /u/ is divided into two p...