1 Is vowel reduction centralization or contextual assimilation? Vowel reduction has traditionally been considered as centralization. A tube modelling a centralized connguration of an average sized male speaker resonates at 500 Hz, 1500 Hz, and 2500 Hz (Fant 1960). That is, the formants are evenly spaced. It was suggested that in both British and American varieties of English, most vowels approa...

Vowel epenthesis processes vary in their characteristics, and many aspects of typology are still under continuous study even English, wherein a lot academic work has been done, much less so Yoruba other African languages where large part research on the phenomenon is evolving. The focus this identification form pattern as well diversity vowel loanwords language. also attempts to identify functi...

This study examines which English vowel is matched with which vowel in Standard Mandarin in loanword adaptation, investigates the general patterns for and restrictions on vowel adaptation in Standard Mandarin loanwords, and determines which aspects of vowel quality is more carefully replicated than others. The results show that despite the seemingly high degree of variation, there are systemati...

This study investigated the shortand long-term effects of a high variability perceptual training on the production of three English vowel contrasts (/i//ɪ/; /ɛ/-/æ/; /u/-/ʊ/) by Portuguese learners. The perceptual training consisted of five sessions divided into two blocks that included both discrimination and identification tasks followed by immediate feedback with natural stimuli produced by ...

This study examines the potential role of the auditory spectral integration in phonetic vowel quality decisions. Synthetic stimuli included a “virtual formant (F2)” which was produced by inserting two pairs of sine waves below and above a “perceptual target frequency” (the spectral center-of-gravity, COG). Intensity weighting across the pairs of sine waves created a virtual F2, i.e., an F2 perc...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced iranian esl learners. a total of 36 adult iranian esl learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at memorial university (mun) were recruited for the study. advanced participants had the experience of living in canada for at least three years while beginners...

Many Sinitic languages respect low vowel raising (LVR) whereby the low vowel /a/ is raised to /e/ only when flanked by a palatal glide and a coronal coda. In this article, I show that LVR in Sinitic languages is a genuine process of grammar because low-level phonetic coarticulatory effects alone cannot account for crosslinguistic/dialectal variation. Specifically, my survey reveals that vowel d...

In same-different discrimination tasks employing isolated vowel sounds, subjects often give significantly more "different" responses to one order of two stimuli than to the other order. Cowan and Morse [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 500-507 (1986)] proposed a neutralization hypothesis to account for such effects: The first vowel in a pair is assumed to change its quality in memory in the direction of...

Kurzfassung: Learners with different native language backgrounds often show problems in the acquisition of German vowels caused by interferences of the phonological vowel system of the native language with the complex German vowel system. German not only distinguishes between tense and lax vowels but also between short and long vowels. The aim of the vowel trainer is to help learners of German ...