Speaking is generally considered efficient in that less effort is spent articulating more redundant items. With efficient speech production, less reduction is expected in the articulation of phonemes that are more important (distinctive) for word identification. The importance of a single segment in word recognition can be quantified as the information (in bits) it adds to the preceding word on...

Lindblom (1990) among others has proposed that talkers accommodate listeners’ communicative needs by controlling the degree of reduction (hyperand hypoarticulation) in different contextual conditions, thereby maintaining sufficient intelligibility of words across a variety of contexts. Lindblom’s proposal predicts that lexical factors that affect intelligibility of a word will affect the hypoan...

Vowel reduction is a common pronunciation phenomenon in stress-timed languages like English. Native speakers tend to weaken unstressed vowels into schwa-like sound. It an essential factor that makes the accent of language learners sound unnatural. To improve vowel detection phoneme recognition framework, we propose end-to-end method introduces prior knowledge as auxiliary information. In partic...

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn po...

Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...

Vowel duration has been an issue in the study of Civili. Although minimal pairs based on vowel duration can be established at both perceptual and physical level, vowel lengthening still occurs in the context of voiced consonants in the language. A comparison between a measured physical duration and an experimentally perceived duration confirms the phonemic distinctiveness of vowel length and in...

It is widely claimed that close vowels in Japanese are devoiced when they occur between voiceless consonants. In this paper, voiceless vowels are represented symbolically as [V-] and voiced vowels as [V+]. The patterns of linguopalatal contact during C[V-]C units and the corresponding C[V+]C units are examined using the method of electropalatography (EPG). Our results show that C[V-]C units and...

The well-studied phenomenon of vowel lengthening before tense sonorants in Modern Irish (Ó Siadhail 1989, Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975, Ó Baoill 1979), exemplified in (1), is now well understood as a compensatory process (see for example Ní Chiosain 1991). Tense or long sonorants (L, L', R', N, N', m) trigger vowel lengthening and/or diphthongization. What is not clear about this phenomenon is th...