A basic constituent of French intonation is the Accentual Phrase (AP), which includes two distinct tonal events: a final LH* accentual rise and an initial LHi rise. A previous study had shown a difference between the rising movements according to the the position of the AP within the intonational phrase (IP): prenuclear (P, IP-initial) versus nuclear (N, IPfinal). The present paper explains thi...

We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several " nonaligned " vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน <ɛ:fn> is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other " aligned " vowels are written an...

The child’s path towards an ability to produce initial consonant clusters has previously been described as involving, perhaps optional, stages of application of the processes ‘cluster simplification’ and ‘cluster reduction’ (for instance Grunwell, 1987). The process of ‘cluster simplification’ is described as a deletion of all but one members of the cluster, resulting in a unbranched syllable o...

The paper investigates the temporal structures of three types of syllables, CV:, CVN, and CVV (C = [p ph ts tsh s], V: = [aː], VN = [an], VV = [ai]), in Cantonese. Results of a temporal analysis of the speech samples from two 9to 10-year-old Cantonese-speaking children are as follows. First, the durations of the syllable-initial consonants and the following rime are not negatively correlated, a...

Infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder display differences in early language and social communication skills beginning as early as the first year of life. While environmental influences on early language development are well documented in other infant populations, they have received relatively little attention inside of the infant sibling context. In this study, we analyzed h...

This paper addresses the presence and type of consonant distortions in speech of 79 French speakers with dysarthria due to Parkinson’s disease (PD), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and cerebellar ataxia (CA), and 26 control speakers. A total of 4990 consonants including selected occurrences of /d/, /g/, /t/, /k/ and /s/ in CV word-initial syllables, and /t/ in CV word medial and IP initial ...

The bursts and voiced formant transitions are well known as separate cues to the place of articulation of initial stop consonant. The Vietnamese presents three final voiceless stop consonants /p, t, k/ without bursts. It is an opportunity to study these final stop consonants and to compare their characteristics with those of the corresponding initial stop consonants. This paper analyses these f...

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...

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose labels differed by their initial consonant (Exp...