The present study investigated the production of British English (BrE) vowels by Yemeni-Arabic learners English. Specifically, most problematic BrE for those were explored in relation to Lados’ (1957) contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM). Sixty-seven Yemeni EFL at different proficiency levels completed a questionnaire, which mainly how difficult a...

How does the brain extract invariant properties of variable-rate speech? A neural model, called PHONET, is developed to explain aspects of this process and, along the way, data about perceptual context effects. For example, in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, such as /ba/ and /wa/, an increase in the duration of the vowel can cause a switch in the percept of the preceding consonant from /w/ to /...

The high-frequency region of vowel signals (above the third formant or F3) has received little research attention. Recent evidence, however, has documented the perceptual utility of high-frequency information in the speech signal above the traditional frequency bandwidth known to contain important cues for speech and speaker recognition. The purpose of this study was to determine if high-pass f...

It has been argued that orthographic representations-the abstract mental representations of the spellings of words-include orthography-specific information regarding the consonant/vowel (CV) identity of the individual letters that make up a word's spelling. This hypothesis has been used to explain the finding that the substitution errors in the spelling of certain dysgraphic individuals exhibit...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Spanish children that are learning to read use the syllable unit in word reading. We used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommerges, Freavenfelder & Seguí, 1981). For Experiment I, we selected first grade readers at the end of the first year of reading instruction. In the Experiment II we selected second grade r...

Vowel devoicing is a phenomenon that is reported to occur in many languages such as Japanese, Parisian and Montreal French, Turkish and English. This paper investigates vowel devoicing in Korean. A devoiced vowel does not exhibit characteristic vocal tract resonances, and instead is realized as a long interval of aspiration or frication following consonant release, resulting in non-distinct seg...

To produce near-native American English (AE) vowels, Japanese speakers must extend their five vowel system with at least six new vowels. Three experiments have been conducted to acquire both perceptual and acoustic measures about Japanese accented English (JE)vowels. Six non-back vowels of AE in several phonetic environments were recorded from four Japanese male talkers with moderate English sk...

This paper examines to what extent acoustic similarity between native and non-native vowels predicts non-native vowel perception and whether this process is influenced by listeners' native and other non-native dialects. Listeners with Northern and Southern British English dialects completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they categorized tokens of 15 Dutch vowels in terms of English vo...

The purpose of the study is to obtain measurements of the formant frequencies of the 7 long vowels [i... y... E... {... a... O... u...] in the (C)V: syllables and 7 half-long vowels [i y E { a O u] in the (C)V:S syllables, and 4 short vowels [I å ∏ U] in the (C)VS syllables in Cantonese. Results show that (1) in the F1/F2 plane the half-long vowels except [a] are centralized relative to the lon...