This paper examines the influence of the first language on the accuracy with which trained phoneticians judge isolated monophthongs taken from the phoneme systems of two different languages. The main finding of this study was that the speaker’s as well as listener’s L1 background have a significant influence on judgements which were made by means of the IPA vowel diagram. This paper consists of...

This article presents the results of an acoustic analysis of vowels and plosives/affricates produced by 45 Mandarin-speaking children with hearing impairment. Vowel production is represented and categorized into three groups by vowel space size calculated with normalized F1 and F2 values of corner vowels. The correlation between speech intelligibility and language abilities assessed by the leve...

Recent studies have demonstrated that mothers exaggerate phonetic properties of infant-directed (ID) speech. However, these studies focused on a single acoustic dimension (frequency), whereas speech sounds are composed of multiple acoustic cues. Moreover, little is known about how mothers adjust phonetic properties of speech to children with hearing loss. This study examined mothers' production...

The articulatory distinctiveness among vowels has been frequently characterized descriptively based on tongue height and front-back position; however, very few empirical methods have been proposed to characterize vowels based on timevarying articulatory characteristics. Such information is not only needed to improve knowledge about the articulation of vowels but also to determine the contributi...

Current models of human vocal production that capture peripheral dynamics in speech require large dimensional measurements of the neural activity, which are mapped into equally complex motor gestures. In this work we present a motor description for vowels as points in a discrete low-dimensional space. We monitor the dynamics of 3 points at the oral cavity using Hall-effect transducers and magne...

A key barrier to making phonetic studies scalable and replicable is the need to rely on subjective, manual annotation. To help meet this challenge, a machine learning algorithm was developed for automatic measurement of a widely used phonetic measure: vowel duration. Manually-annotated data were used to train a model that takes as input an arbitrary length segment of the acoustic signal contain...

Auditory feedback in the headphones of talkers was manipulated in the F1 dimension using a real-time vowel formant filtering system. Minimum formant shifts required to elicit a response and the amount of compensation were measured for vowels across the English vowel space. The largest response in production of F1 was observed for the vowel /ε/ and smaller or non-significant changes were found f...

This paper presents an approach to predicting vowel quality in vocal music performances, based on common acoustic features (mainly MFCCs). Rather than performing classification, we use linear regression to project spoken or sung vowels into a continuous articulatory space: the IPA Vowel Chart. We introduce a real-time on-line visualisation tool, the Vowel Worm, which builds upon the resulting m...

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

This acoustic study examines sound (vowel) change in apparent time across three successive generations of 123 adult female speakers ranging in age from 20 to 65 years old, representing three regional varieties of American English, typical of western North Carolina, central Ohio and southeastern Wisconsin. A set of acoustic measures characterized the dynamic nature of formant trajectories, the a...