It is widely claimed that close vowels in Japanese are devoiced when they occur between voiceless consonants. In this paper, voiceless vowels are represented symbolically as [V-] and voiced vowels as [V+]. The patterns of linguopalatal contact during C[V-]C units and the corresponding C[V+]C units are examined using the method of electropalatography (EPG). Our results show that C[V-]C units and...

The well-studied phenomenon of vowel lengthening before tense sonorants in Modern Irish (Ó Siadhail 1989, Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975, Ó Baoill 1979), exemplified in (1), is now well understood as a compensatory process (see for example Ní Chiosain 1991). Tense or long sonorants (L, L', R', N, N', m) trigger vowel lengthening and/or diphthongization. What is not clear about this phenomenon is th...

Abstract In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by segment /t/. However, at right edge, there another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves final /t/ associated to suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final are derived when stem vowel V position suffix, blocking association This right-edge...

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is reaching further and further into everyday life with Apple’s Siri, Google voice search, automated telephone information systems, dictation devices, closed captioning, and other applications. Along with such advances in speech technology, sociolinguists have been considering new methods for alignment and vowel formant extraction, including techniques like th...

This study is part of a larger project investigating the acquisition of stable vowel-plus-consonant timing patterns needed to convey the phonemic vowel length and the voicing contrast in German. The research is motivated by findings showing greater temporal variability in children until the age of 12. The specific aims of the current study were to test (1) whether temporal variability in the pr...

The vowel systems of natural languages are frequently supposed to satisfy universal rules. For instance, from a phonological poin� of view, every vowel system should obey a rule with respect to 'diversity' in some way, e.g. with respect to the vowel features length, frontness, height and round­ ing. Phonological theories often us� these features .in order to explain the phonological structure o...

A modification of the City University of New York nonsense syllable test (CUNY NST) has been developed in which (a) the several subtests of the original test are replaced with a 22-item consonant-vowel (CV) subtest and a 16-item vowel-consonant (VC) subtest; and, (b) the response choices for each target syllable include all 22 initial and all 16 final consonants, respectively. In addition, the ...

This study deals with listeners' ability to identify linguistic units from linguistically incomplete stimuli and relates this to the potentiality of vowel reduction in a word. Synthetic speech was used to produce stimuli that were similar to real words, but where the vowel in the pre-stress syllable was excluded. Listeners then performed a lexical decision test, where they had to decide whether...