The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of three acoustic modifications derived from clear speech for improving consonant recognition by young and elderly normal-hearing subjects. Percent-correct nonsense syllable recognition was measured for four stimulus sets: unmodified stimuli; stimuli with consonant duration increased by 100%; stimuli with consonant-vowel ratio increased b...

Two experiments on same-different vowel discrimination are reported. In each, the main variable was the duration of a silent delay between the two items being judged. As would be expected from the assumption that such judgements depend at least partly on auditory sensory memory, longer delays led to poorer discrimination than shorter delays. The auditory memory loss seems to be asymptotic at ab...

We developed and tested a brain-computer interface for control of an artificial speech synthesizer by an individual with near complete paralysis. This neural prosthesis for speech restoration is currently capable of predicting vowel formant frequencies based on neural activity recorded from an intracortical microelectrode implanted in the left hemisphere speech motor cortex. Using instantaneous...

It was found out that allophones of vowel phonemes /i/ and /e/, surrounded by palatalized consonants, differed significantly in their duration, though their openness – the major articulator correlate of inherent vowel duration (IVD) – was practically the same. It is hypothesized that duration contrast between [i] and [e] is controlled by speakers of Russian to set off the lack of spectral disti...

This paper presents two unsupervised approaches to Automatic Language Identification (ALI) based on a segmental preprocessing. In the Global Segmental Model approach, the language system is modeled by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) trained with automatically detected segments. In the Phonetic Differentiated Model approach, an unsupervised detection vowel/non vowel is performed and the language ...

Theories on the mechanisms of phoneme identification generally involve only the actual segment and the transitions to and from neighbouring segments. In a l istening experiment we tested the importance for vowel and consonant identification of the presence of speech segments beyond the transition parts. The resu lts clearly show that identification continues to improve when speech is added beyo...

We investigated the brain mechanisms enabling one automatically discriminate phoneme category irrespective of the large inter-speaker variability in the acoustic features of the voices. For this purpose, subjects were presented with 450 different speech stimuli, each uttered by a different speaker, belonging to three vowel categories, while a 306-channel magnetoencephalogram (MEG) was obtained ...

BACKGROUND Phonological disorder. AIM To apply the percentage of correct consonant (PCC) index and to verify the correlation between this index and the one applied perceptually by judges. METHOD The PCC index of 50 phonological disordered subjects was calculated, after 60 judges heard the phonological tests for each subject and perceptually attributed the severity. RESULTS The PCC index v...