The present study will focus on occurrence of fully voiced, devoiced and elided high vowels in Japanese. High vowels elision in Japanese is supported by clear acoustic evidences, even though it is not globally accepted by scholars in the field. Elided vowels, hence, are considered here to have their own status. Moreover, this study is conceived in order to state differences and analogies among ...

How syllable-timed is Italian? We investigate two contexts for vowel reduction, unstressed syllables and syllables in polysyllabic words. In a production experiment, a large sample of speakers from Tuscany read diand trisyllabic target words with different stress placement in a sentence context. Results showed vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, both in terms of duration and spectral quali...

The extent o which the 500-Hz component of a steady-state vowel contributed to its phonemic category was measured by estimating the position of the/I/-/t/phoneme boundary along a first formant (F1) continuum. Shifts in the phoneme boundary were calibrated against hifts produced by physical changes inthe level of the 500-Hz component. When the 500-Hz component was presented contralateral tothe r...

Many listener-oriented theories of phonetic reduction assume that the talker has tacit knowledge of an interlocutor’s mental state, and consequently predict that talkers with poor theory of mind should exhibit inconsistent behavior between semantic contexts. This study examined effects of individual differences in theory of mind skills on extent of phonetic reduction in three acoustic domains (...

Several behavioral studies have suggested that speakers of languages with variable stress (e.g., Spanish) are better than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French) at discriminating stress contrasts. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. However, when the vowel quality cue is absent, native speake...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...

Recent studies have shown that talkers implicitly imitate/accommodate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech [1, 2]. However, it has also been shown that this phonetic imitation effect is not an automatic process [3, 4]: in [3], the artificially lengthened VOT on /p/ was imitated in a non-shadowing task, while shortened VOT (which could jeopardize phonemic contrast) was not imitated, ...

This paper presents the first description of vowel devoicing in Quechua. The characteristics of the process as well as the environments most conducive to its occurrence are reported based on an analysis of 4062 vowels extracted from interviews with 16 speakers of the Cusco Collao dialect. Patterns of Quechua vowel devoicing appear to be generally consistent with the gestural overlap model that ...

Since the seminal work of Lindblom (1963) a wealth of studies have investigated undershoot and the factors governing its occurrence and variability. However, although sex-specific differences in reduction patterns have been found in adults (Byrd 1994; Whiteside 1996), as well as in children (McCormack & Knighton 1996), possible sex-specific differences in formant transitions and in particular u...