This quantitative study examines vowel adaptation patterns in English-based Standard Mandarin (SM) loanwords drawn from a dictionary corpus. The findings are: (i) English non-central vowels are mostly matched in backness in SM, (ii) English high and low vowels have a strong tendency to be retained as high and low respectively in SM, whereas matches for English mid vowels mostly vary between mid...

The spectral characteristics of vowels in Modern Greek and German were examined. Four speakers of Modern Greek and three speakers of German produced four repetitions of words containing each vowel of their native language. Measurements of the fundamental frequency and the first three formats were made for each vowel token. These measurements were then transformed into log frequency ratios and p...

This paper investigates the influence of phonological learning upon the perception of non-native vowels. Four groups of Korean and Japanese English learners, at two levels of English experience, and a group of older monolingual Korean listeners were assessed on the perception and production of Australian English monophthongal front vowels: /i: w e æ a:/. Korean is of interest, because of a rece...

For both human and automatic speech recognizers it is difficult to segment continuous speech into discrete units such as words. Word segmentation is so hard because there seem to be no self-evident cues for word boundaries in the speech stream. However, it has been suggested that English listeners can profit from the occurrence of full vowels (i.e. vowels with metrical stress) in the speech str...

This paper deals with pitch estimation of spoken Devnagari vowels from the original speech signals. Devnagari vowels are playing the vital role in pronunciation of any word. Each vowel is classified as starting, middle and end according to the duration of occurrences in the word. The Devnagari script having 12-vowels and 34-consonants are used in some Indian language like Marathi. The Devnagari...

This paper investigates Arabic terms used as equivalents for English consonants and vowels. The terms, namely harf sakin (consonants) harakat (vowels), are specifically tailored the study of linguistic items. In bilingual dictionaries, do not truly reflect realities represented by vowels consonants. aim is therefore to identify that represent within environment. A sketch contrastive analysis in...

This study aimed to assess the relative importance of biomechanical and linguistic constraints on articulatory precision by analyzing contextual and token-to-token variability in tongue postioning for vowels. Contextual variability proved greater for lax vowels. Back vowels showed substantially increasing variability towards more front tongue locations. Regarding token-totoken variability, lax ...

Listeners perceptually assimilate nonnative phones to native phonemes, but do they do so with unfamiliar accents of their own language? We assessed Australian (Aus) listeners’ assimilation of vowels in two unfamiliar English accents, and whether prior short-term exposure to the other accent would yield any adaptation to its vowels. Participants categorized the vowels of nonce words spoken in Au...

We show the perception of Canadian French (CF) vowels by Canadian English (CE) listeners and test a cue-weighting hypothesis to explain the attested assimilation patterns. Five CF vowels, /i, y, u, , æ/, and three allophonic variants, [, , ], were examined. The listeners completed a native-language identification task with goodness of fit judgments. We found that most French vowels were ide...