This paper investigates the perception of non-native phoneme contrasts which exist in the native language, but not in the position tested. Like English, Dutch contrasts voiced and voiceless obstruents. Unlike English, Dutch allows only voiceless obstruents in word-final position. Dutch and English listeners' accuracy on English final voicing contrasts and their use of preceding vowel duration a...

The Spanish language has two rhotics, the voiced alveolar tap / / and the voiced alveolar trill /r/. Depending on context, these phones are either in free variation or complementary distribution; the only exception is in intervocalic position where the presence of the tap or trill signals a difference in meaning, e.g. pero /pe o/ ‘but’ vs. perro /pero/ ‘dog’ (Hualde, 2005). American English, on...

Currently electronic slide (e-slide) is one of the most common styles in educational presentation. Unfortunately, the utilization of e-slide for the visually impaired is uncommon since they are unable to see the content of such e-slides which are usually composed of text, images and animation. This paper proposes a model for presenting e-slide in multimodal presentation i.e. using conventional ...

Two experiments examined production and perception of English temporal patterns by native and non-native participants. Experiment 1 indicated that native and non-native (L1 = Chinese) talkers differed significantly in their production of one English duration pattern (i.e., vowel lengthening before voiced versus voice-less consonants) but not another (i.e., tense versus lax vowels). Experiment 2...

This study investigates the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonant production in six bilingual English-Arabic children in order to examine whether bilingual children possess one unitary or two separate linguistic systems. A total of six English-Arabic bilingual children participated ages 5 to 10. English and Arabic stop consonants followed by a vowel /a/ made by bilingual children were measur...

A wavelet-based speech enhancement algorithm for removing additive background noise from a single channel of noisy speech is proposed. In the algorithm, the enhancement is performed on a frame-by-frame basis, and each frame is classified into either voiced or unvoiced frame to deterimine the appropriate threshold in removing noise. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on Auror...

The issue of the effect of consonant manner on the perceptibility of laryngeal contrast was addressed. Previous studies of perceptual confusion suggest that, in noise, the laryngeal contrast in fricatives is more difficult to perceive than stops for listeners in English, which is typologically classified as an “aspirating” language. The present study examined whether a similar pattern is observ...