This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of voicing in English fricative consonants produced by anterior aphasics and the effects of phonetic context on these characteristics. Three patients produced voiced and voiceless fricative-vowel syllables in isolation, following a voiced velar stop, and following a voiceless velar stop. Acoustic analyses were conducted of the amplitude and p...

The imitation of spoken stop consonants by an articulatory synthesizer using only general learning principles addresses significant issues in speech inversion and speech acquisition. Stop consonants are relatively large, complex acoustic events resulting from discrete articulations, so inversion based on the use of small time windows or based on the minimisation of average articulatory error ac...

We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast in stop consonants. Moreover, a discrimination re...

In this work, a feature-based system for the automatic classification of stop consonants, in speaker independent continuous speech, is reported. The system uses a new auditorybased speech processing front-end that is based on the biologically rooted property of average localized synchrony detection (ALSD). It incorporates new algorithms for the extraction and manipulation of the acoustic-phonet...

The automatic classification of the unvoiced stop consonants is widely considered as a difficult task for traditional frequency domain and even time-frequency methods. Main reason for this is their short duration and diverse temporal structure. In this paper we present a novel method for stop consonant recognition. The method is based on statistical properties of short temporal fine structure o...

Gujarati and White Hmong are among a small handful of languages known to maintain a phonemic contrast between breathy and modal voice across both obstruents and vowels. Given that breathiness on stop consonants is realized as a breathy-voiced aspirated release into the following vowel, how is consonant breathiness distinguished from vocalic breathiness, if at all? We examine acoustic and electr...

Qaqet is a non-Austronesian Baining language of Papua New Guinea, with very small phoneme inventory 16 consonants and four vowels, including the voiced stops /b d ɡ/. These are often phonetically realized as prenasalized [mb nd ŋɡ], this feature assumed to be result contact surrounding Oceanic languages. Our data consist isolated word recordings from six female speakers language. Using range ac...

Stress can be signaled through a number of different acoustic properties, including increased duration, greater intensity, and higher fundamental frequency. Stress may also affect segmental and syllable structure. Typically, stressed syllables trigger qualitative fortition and/or lengthening, whereas unstressed syllables are associated with lenition and/or shortening. To take an example of a st...