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 ...

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 ...

Infants’ acquisition of phonetic categories involves a distributional learning mechanism that operates on acoustic dimensions of the input. However, natural infant-directed speech shows large degrees of phonetic variability, and the resulting overlap between categories suggests that category learning based on distributional clustering may not be feasible without constraints on the learning proc...