This paper describes the vowels characteristics of three languages of Nagaland namely Nagamese, Ao and Lotha. For this study, nucleus vowel duration, formant structure (1 st and 2 nd formant i.e. F1 and F2) and intensity of vowels are investigated and analyzed for these languages. This paper includes the nasal context for different vowels and tries to examine its importance in different languag...

This study investigates the acoustic and perceptual consequences of nasal coarticulation in American English. Nasalized (coarticulated) vowels were found to be closer in the F1-F2 acoustic vowel space than corresponding oral (non-coarticulated) vowels, indicating that contrast is reduced in the nasal vowel space, relative to the oral vowel space. With respect to perception, listeners are, perha...

Danish has a distinctive vowel length opposition which is realized with little differences in vowel qualities. This paper investigates the possibilities of using this fact in reducing the size of the speech unit database in a high quality concatenative based text-to-speech system for Danish. The purpose is to evaluate the concept of using long vowels for synthesizing the corresponding short vow...

This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were com...

This article discusses the results of a study which investigated Cantonese ESL learners’ perception of English vowels and their perceived similarity between similar L1 and L2 vowels in an attempt to test the prediction of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). Forty university English majors participated in three L2 perception tasks, which aimed at discerning their perception of English vowel...

Adults and infants were tested for the capacity to detect correspondences between nonspeech sounds and real vowels. The /i/ and /a/ vowels were presented in 3 different ways: auditory speech, silent visual faces articulating the vowels, or mentally imagined vowels. The nonspeech sounds were either pure tones or 3-tone complexes that isolated a single feature of the vowel without allowing the vo...

Identification of simultaneous speech sounds, such as pairs of steady-state vowels (double vowels), is more accurate when there is a difference in fundamental frequency (F0). Accuracy of identification for double vowels increases with increasing F0 difference (delta F0) asymptoting above 1 semitone. The experiment described here attempts to distinguish two mechanisms underlying this effect: fir...

This experiment determined the relation between discrimination thresholds and thejudgement of vowels as good, confusable, or non-English. A large Fl-by-F2 vowel space encompassing five American English front vowels was synthesized in equal Bark steps. The structure of the vowel space was quite different across listeners except for the vowels /i/ and Gael. Discrimination thresholds were uniform ...

Several studies have shown enhancement of auditory evoked sustained responses for periodic over non-periodic sounds and for vowels over non-vowels. Here, we directly compared pitch and vowels using synthesized speech with a "damped" amplitude modulation. These stimuli were parametrically varied to yield four classes of matched stimuli: (1) periodic vowels (2) non-periodic vowels, (3) periodic n...

The present study investigated the production of British English (BrE) vowels by Yemeni-Arabic learners English. Specifically, most problematic BrE for those were explored in relation to Lados’ (1957) contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM). Sixty-seven Yemeni EFL at different proficiency levels completed a questionnaire, which mainly how difficult a...