introduction: the feedback provided by auditory apparatus equips normal hearing people with an important controlling mechanism over the speech production processes. the speech of hearing-impaired children is both perceptually and acoustically abnormal. this study tried to compare the formant frequencies of three long vowels in persian-speaking children who used cochlear implant and those who we...

OBJECTIVE Scores on consonant-recognition tests are widely used as an index of speech-perception ability in cochlear implant (CI) users. The consonant stimuli in these tests are typically presented in the /alpha/ vowel context, even though consonants in conversational speech occur in many other contexts. For this reason, it would be useful to know whether vowel context has any systematic effect...

This paper deals with an approach to automatic language identification based on rhythmic modelling. Beside phonetics and phonotactics, rhythm is actually one of the most promising features to be considered for language identification, even if its extraction and modelling are not a straightforward issue. Actually, one of the main problems to address is what to model. In this paper, an algorithm ...

Nonlinear sensory and neural processing mechanisms have been exploited to enhance spectral contrast for improvement of speech understanding in noise. The "companding" algorithm employs both two-tone suppression and adaptive gain mechanisms to achieve spectral enhancement. This study implemented a 50-channel companding strategy and evaluated its efficiency as a front-end noise suppression techni...

background: one of the most common complaints expressed by individuals with hearing-impairment is the difficulty in speech perception in background noise. different tests have been developed for the evaluation of reduced ability of speech perception in noise, and the consonant-vowel in noise test is one of the simplest one regard to speech materials. the goal of the present study was developmen...

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...

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 ...