The purpose of our study is to show that phonological knowledge is an important basis for making predictions during speech perception. Taking the phonological constraint in English that coda obstruent clusters agree in their value for voicing, we conducted two experiments using vowel–stop–fricative sequences, where the task was to identify the fricative. Stimuli included sequences that were eit...

Of the Taiwanese participants, only one showed any significant speech rate effect (t = 1.88, p < .05 for the first vowel of the tokens; t =2.29, p < .025 for both vowels combined). One other showed no speech rate effects whatsoever, instead inconsistently devoicing some tokens, while the third did not devoice any vowels within the tokens, instead only devoicing a small number of sentence-final ...

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

The IFCASL corpus is a French-German bilingual phonetic learner corpus designed, recorded and annotated in a project on individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning. The motivation for setting up this corpus was that there is no phonetically annotated and segmented corpus for this language pair of comparable of size and coverage. In contrast to most learner corpora, the...

This paper presents analyses on the phonological voicing contrast in whispered speech, which is characterized by the absence of vocal fold vibrations. In modal speech, besides glottal vibration, the contrast between voiced and unvoiced consonants is realized by other phonetic correlates: e.g. consonant and pre-consonantal vowel durations, intraoral pressure differences. The analysis of these vo...

In this study we examine the acoustic properties of a relatively complex set of obstruents found in Komi-Permyak: voiceless and voiced denti-alveolar stops and fricatives, apical and laminal post-alveolar affricates and fricatives, and palatal stops. The results show that these consonants are well differentiated by a range of acoustic properties – both durational and spectral – as a combined ef...

The present study attempts to characterize the aerodynamic conditions required for the production of apical trills and to account for some universal tendencies in the patterning of trills in terms of their aerodynamic and distinctiveness requirements. In order to ascertain the aerodynamic conditions required for trills, oropharyngeal pressure (Po) and airflow were recorded simultaneously in two...

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children’s spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final d of words such as salad than non-African American students after their spelling performance on ot...