The vowel systems of Catalan and Spanish are considerably different. Spanish has a simple fivevowel symmetrical system, which is the most common number of vowel phonemes cross-linguistically (Hualde, 2005). As shown in Table 1, the vowels contrast along two dimensions: along the height dimension, there are two high vowels (/i/ and /u/), two mid vowels (/e/ and /o/), and one low vowel (/a/); and...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if fluent early bilinguals who are highly experienced in their second language (L2) can produce L2 vowels in a way that is indistinguishable from native speakers' vowels. The subjects were native speakers of Italian who began learning English when they immigrated to Canada as children or adults ('early' vs. 'late' bilinguals). The early bilinguals ...

Our study investigated the pitch and duration properties of word stress in a large speech corpus. We concluded that pitch and duration play different roles in distinguishing word-level stress classes. In the case of pitch, primary-stress vowels were different from secondary-stress and reduced vowels; in the case of duration, reduced vowels were different from the other two types of vowels.

Arabic, the world’s second most spoken language in terms of number of speakers, has not received much attention from the traditional speech processing research community. This study is specifically concerned with the analysis of vowels in modern standard Arabic dialect. The first and second formant values in these vowels are investigated and the differences and similarities between the vowels e...

The paper addresses the question of native speakers’ online awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of surface vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant. In a cross-modal forced-choice experiment, we investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is represented and that t...

This project investigates the articulatory properties of German vowels on the basis of tagged Cine-MRI data. German has 15 monophthongs, which are classified into seven tense-lax pairs. Understanding the phonetic correlate of vowel tenseness has proven elusive, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining global shape information for the tongue, especially the pharyngeal portion. Tagged Cine-MRI a...

The velopharyngeal opening (VPO) is analyzed in 17 professional operatic singers, 3 high sopranos, 3 sopranos, 2 mezzo-sopranos, 3 tenors, 2 baritones, 2 bass-baritones, and 2 basses singing the vowels [a, i, u] at middle degree of vocal loudness at different pitches throughout their pitch range. Three methods were used for detection of a VPO. One was nasofiberscopy, which revealed VPO of vario...

Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been a...

Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...