This paper examines the use of glottal stops in English as a second language and Polish by Polish native speakers and in English by native speakers. The study compares glottal stop frequency in utterance-initial accented and unaccented positions. The major finding is that Polish native speakers use more glottal stops in English in unaccented than in accented syllables. This tendency is compared...

BACKGROUND There is strong evidence that bilinguals have a deficit in speech perception for their second language compared with monolingual speakers under unfavourable listening conditions (e.g., noise or reverberation), despite performing similarly to monolingual speakers under quiet conditions. This deficit persists for speakers highly proficient in their second language and is greater in tho...

This paper examined the intelligibility of English / / and / / followed by the vowel / / produced by 20 native speakers of Japanese (JE / /, JE / /), and the acoustic characteristics of JE / / and / / according to the different levels of intelligibility. Five native English speakers evaluated the intelligibility of JE /s/ and / / in the word-initial position of “seat” and “sheet.” The major ene...

We have previously shown that for English speakers information on the mouth shape of a speaker is a powerful feature for the machine based discrimination of prominent from nonprominent words. In this paper we extend our analysis to data from Japanese speakers. We compare the discrimination performance of the different acoustic and visual features we extract for the two languages. This compariso...

This letter focuses on the automatic estimation of the first subglottal resonance (Sg1). A database comprising speech and subglottal data of native American English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers was used for the analysis. Data from 11 speakers (five males and six females) were used to derive an empirical relation among the first formant frequency, fundamental frequency, and Sg...

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that further support and refine it. The results demonstra...

Culturally valid speech and language testing measures for use with African-American children who are speakers of Black English (BE) are limited. An alternative to developing new tests for use with this population is to adapt currently available tests designed for use with standard English speakers. The purpose of this study was to compare the responses of 28 low-income, urban African-American p...

Native speakers of Japanese and Korean assessed perceived similarity between American English vowels and vowels of their L1, and native speakers of American English performed the same task. The results revealed no significant main effects of listener groups, but a significant interaction of vowels by listener groups was confirmed. The results indicate that listeners’ L1 phonology as well as pho...

Past studies have shown that when formants are perturbed in real time, speakers spontaneously compensate for the perturbation by changing their formant frequencies in the opposite direction to the perturbation. Further, the pattern of these results suggests that the processing of auditory feedback error operates at a purely acoustic level. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the response of...

This paper examined the intelligibility of the English mid-low central vowel / / produced by 20 native Japanese speakers (JE / /), and the acoustic characteristics of JE / / according to the different levels of intelligibility. Five native English speakers evaluated the intelligibility of JE / / in the word “but.” F1 and F2 frequencies and the duration of JE / / were measured and compared with ...