Linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis was used to create morphed natural tokens of English voiced stop consonants ranging from /b/ to /d/ and /d/ to /g/ in four vowel contexts (/i/, /æ/, /a/, /u/). Both vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) and consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli were created. A total of 320 natural-sounding acoustic speech stimuli were created, comprising 16 stimulus series. A behavioral exp...

Previous research shows that the implementation of obstruent voicing in American English is strongly influenced by adjacent sounds and prosodic factors, but studies mainly focus on words in isolation and carrier phrases. This study examines the voicing of stops and fricatives in phrase-medial position in the connected speech of 37 speakers. Results indicate that stops devoice most often word-in...

"\Ye describe the representation of synthetic stopconsonants in a computational model of the mammalian dorsal cochlear nucleus. The speech stimuli have different values of voice-onset time (VOT) and are Iabelied by adult listeners as either /ga/ or /ka/, with a phonetic boundary at 44 ms VOT. The responses of the model's Type IV units to these stimuli also fall into two clear categories with a ...

Does experience with a perceptual cue for a phoneme contrast in the native language affect its use in a second language for a similar contrast in a different phonetic context? Two experiments investigated Dutch and English listeners' use of preceding vowel duration as a perceptual cue for nonword-final fricative voicing in English. Dutch listeners have native language experience with the use of...

Two parallel acoustic analyses were performed for French and English sibilant sequences, based on comparably structured read-speech corpora. They comprised all sequences of voiced and voiceless alveolar and postalveolar sibilants that can occur across word boundaries in the two languages, as well as the individual alveolar and postalveolar sibilants, combined with preceding or following labial ...

Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced v...

Abstract The current study is a partial replication of Flege and Port (Language Speech 24(2):125–146, 1981), which examined the production pre-fortis clipping (i.e., vowel shortening before voiceless obstruents) by Saudi L2 English speakers. In addition, it whether language experience operationalized as length residence in an English-speaking country, had any positive effect on 16 speakers were...

Speech production research has demonstrated that the first language (L1) often interferes with production in bilinguals' second language (L2), but it has been suggested that bilinguals who are L2-dominant are the most likely to suppress this L1-interference. While prolonged contextual changes in bilinguals' language use (e.g., stays overseas) are known to result in L1 and L2 phonetic shifts, co...