A discriminative large-margin algorithm for automatic measurement of voice onset time (VOT) is described, considered as a case of predicting structured output from speech. Manually labeled data are used to train a function that takes as input a speech segment of an arbitrary length containing a voiceless stop, and outputs its VOT. The function is explicitly trained to minimize the difference be...

This research investigated effects of task types on the acquisition of English voice onset time (VOT) by Japanese university students with a short-term but intensive exposure to academic English. The data were collected from 11 Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) receiving English-medium instruction at a university level, 11 Japanese EFL learners enrolled in regular EFL cou...

The present study addresses whether linguistic experience affects the learnability of non-speech categories and in turn whether learning non-speech categories affects speech perception. Speakers of English and Spanish, languages that have different mappings between voice-onset-time (VOT) and their voicing categories, were trained to categorize a series of analogous non-speech (tone-onset-time) ...

Value of Time: Speeding Behavior and Gasoline Prices Do drivers reduce speeds when gasoline prices are high? Previous research investigating this energy conservation hypothesis produced mixed results. We take a fresh look at the data and estimate a significant negative relationship between speeding and gasoline prices. This presents a new methodology of deriving the ‘Value of Time’ (VOT) based ...

Voice onset time (VOT) is a temporal acoustic parameter, which reflects the timing of speech motor control. The objective of the work was to obtain normative VOT data in Swedish children. Thus, 150 children aged 8-11 years old and 36 adults were audio-recorded when producing the plosives in minimal pairs. Measures were made using waveforms and spectrograms. Results show that Swedish children de...

One functional anatomical model of reading, drawing on human neuropsychological and neuroimaging data, proposes that a region in left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) becomes, through experience, specialized for written word perception. We tested this hypothesis by presenting numbers in orthographical and digital form with two task demands, phonological and numerical. We observed a main ef...

PURPOSE In this study, multiple measures of voicing acquisition were used to evaluate the extent to which developmental patterns based on voice onset time (VOT) mean data differed from those based on token-by-token analyses in typically developing 2-year-olds. METHOD Multiple repetitions of words containing initial /b p d t/ were elicited from 10 English-speaking children biweekly for 4 month...

For stimuli modeling stop consonants varying in the acoustic correlates of voice onset time (VOT), human listeners are more likely to perceive stimuli with lower f0's as voiced consonants--a pattern of perception that follows regularities in English speech production. The present study examines the basis of this observation. One hypothesis is that lower f0's enhance perception of voiced stops b...

The brain's functional organization can be altered by visual deprivation. This is observed by comparing blind and sighted people's activation response to tactile discrimination tasks, like braille reading. Where, the blind have higher activation than the sighted upon tactile discrimination tasks, especially high activation difference is seen in ventral occipitotemporal (vOT) cortex. However, it...

Many languages exhibit a voicing distinction with two series of stops, voiced and voiceless, which differ primarily in the relative timing between the consonantal release and the onset of laryngeal vibration, known as voice onset time (VOT) (Lisker and Abramson, 1964). While the exact implementation of VOT for the voicing contrast differs among languages, long lag VOTs, with a long delay betwee...