Remarkably little is known about the acoustic phonetics of infant vocalizations that can be specifically regarded as precursors to speech. It is nonetheless clear that, prior to babbling, infants use a variety of vocalizations, dubbed ‘protophones,’ with varying degrees of phonatory control. It is also clear that phonatory control involves selection among the distinct vibratory regimes known to...

A RECENT COMMENTARY (OSCILLATORS AND SYLLABLES: a cautionary note. Cummins, 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). In arguing against the approach, Cummins raises a cautionary flag "from a phonetician's point of view." Here we respond to his argu...

There is a long tradition of experimental research in the field of prosody, as different aspects of speech production and perception related to prosody have often been part of traditional laboratory and phonetics investigation. However, in recent years, the development of a set of laboratory tools to investigate language performance and its neurocognitive basis has prompted a new experimental a...

This paper describes the speech processing activities conducted at the Polish consortium of the CLARIN project. The purpose of this segment of the project was to develop specific tools that would allow for automatic and semi-automatic processing of large quantities of acoustic speech data. The tools include the following: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, speech-to-text alignment, voice activity ...

Mapping from acoustic signals to lexical representations is a complex process mediated by a number of different levels of representation. This paper reviews properties of the phonetic and phonological levels, and hypotheses about how category structure is represented at each of these levels, and evaluates these hypotheses in light of relevant electrophysiological studies of phonetics and phonol...

We examine the phonetic characteristics of yer and non-yer vowels in Slovak in an effort to improve our understanding of the link between phonological differences and their phonetic realizations. We test the wide-spread assumption of phonological analyses that yer vowels are phonetically identical to their non-yer counterparts with measures of vowel duration, vowel quality and the patterns of c...

We quantitatively investigate how the telephone channel and regional dialect might impact formant frequencies estimates extracted from tools commonly used in law enforcement. The telephone channel and regional dialect are important factors in forensic phonetics. In 90% of forensic cases, the speech sample in question is recorded after transmission via telephone (Byrne and Foulkes, 2004). In add...

The present study investigated the role of Chinese orthography in the organization of the mental lexicon. In the experiment, four radicals used to carry semantic information and four phonetics used to carry phonological information in pictophonetic characters were presented. Subjects were asked to generate characters that contain the given radicals or phonetics in one minute and write them down...