Processing large amounts of non-native (L2) phonological data for acquisition-related research remains a challenging task, especially when acoustic analyses are not straightforward as is the case with nasal vowels. Within the InterPhonologie du Français Contemporain project (IPFC), we have developed a perceptual coding procedure and a piece of dedicated software aimed at providing an intermedia...

The Lexical Access From Features (LAFF) project tries to model the representation and perception of speech by human listeners. The derivation of such a representation involves first finding certain acoustic landmarks. Based on the landmarks and the acoustic cues surrounding the landmarks, distinctive features of the speech segments may be deciphered. The present study concentrates on the nasali...

Conventional speech communication systems do not perform well in the absence of an intelligible acoustic signal. Silent Speech Interfaces enable speech communication to take place with speech-handicapped users and in noisy environments. However, since no acoustic signal is available, information on nasality may be absent, which is an important and relevant characteristic of several languages, p...

Vocal emotions, as well as different speaking styles and speaker traits are characterized by a complex interplay of multiple prosodic features. Natural sounding speech synthesis with the ability to control such paralinguistic aspects requires the manipulation of the corresponding prosodic features. With traditional concatenative speech synthesis it is easy to manipulate the “primary” prosodic f...

Allophones are diverse phonetic instantiations of a single underlying sound category. As such, they pose a peculiar problem for infant language learners: These variants occur in the ambient language, but they are not used to encode lexical contrasts. Infants' sensitivity to sounds varying along allophonic dimensions declines by 11 months of age, suggesting that there must be information to phon...

This study explores the effects of prosodic boundaries on nasality at intonational phrase, word, and syllable boundaries. The subjects were recorded saying phrases that contained a syllable-final nasal consonant followed by a syllable-initial stop. The timing, duration, and magnitude of the nasal airflows measured were used to determine the extent of nasality across boundaries. Nasal amplitudes...

The quality of cleft lip and palate (CLP) speech is affected due to hyper-nasality and mis-articulation. Surgery and speech therapy are required to correct the structural and functional defects of CLP, which will result in an enhanced speech signal. The quality of the enhanced speech is perceptually evaluated by speech-language pathologists and results are highly biased. In this work, a signal ...

Nasality is a very important characteristic of several languages, European Portuguese being one of them. This paper addresses the challenge of nasality detection in surface electromyography (EMG) based speech interfaces. We explore the existence of useful information about the velum movement and also assess if muscles deeper down in the face and neck region can be measured using surface electro...

Objective: The main purpose of this study is to determine the treatment effectiveness of pharyngeal flap surgery by measuring speech outcome 1 year after surgery. The authors hypothesized that flap surgery is an effective technique for velopharyngeal inadequacy resulting in improved intelligibility, decreased hypernasality and nasalance scores and normal voice characteristics. Patients and Meth...