Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is reaching further and further into everyday life with Apple’s Siri, Google voice search, automated telephone information systems, dictation devices, closed captioning, and other applications. Along with such advances in speech technology, sociolinguists have been considering new methods for alignment and vowel formant extraction, including techniques like th...

Objective whole-spectrum and formant analyses have been performed on all 15 Dutch vowels pronounced in /C1VC2/ words by 24 deaf and 24 normal-hearing children, in order to develop a model of pronunciation quality for evaluating (deaf) speech; the results as obtained for adult males by Bakkum et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1989-2004 (1993)] have been verified and extended. Spectral representati...

The extent o which the 500-Hz component of a steady-state vowel contributed to its phonemic category was measured by estimating the position of the/I/-/t/phoneme boundary along a first formant (F1) continuum. Shifts in the phoneme boundary were calibrated against hifts produced by physical changes inthe level of the 500-Hz component. When the 500-Hz component was presented contralateral tothe r...

Abstract Previous research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, this case, speakers Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest /i/ backing is invoked signal negative affect. demonstrates h...

This article is concerned with the acoustic correlates that characterize stress and accent in Catalan and Spanish. We analyzed four acoustic correlates of stress (syllable duration, vowel quality, overall intensity, and spectral balance) in four conditions, namely, stressed and unstressed syllables in both accented and unaccented environments. This allowed us to examine the relative strength of...

The reduction of the six Bulgarian vowels (i, ɛ, a, ɜ, ɔ, u) to a fouror (in some dialects) three-vowel subsystem (i, (ɜ), ɜ, u) in unstressed syllables is generally accepted. But a number of studies disagree on the exact nature of the reduction process. Claims differ as to whether or not /a/ merges phonetically with /ɜ/, and /ɔ/ with /u/, or whether the assumed neutralized oppositions take a p...

This study investigates the perceived vowel quality change caused by formant undershoot, where vowels in /CVC/ environments are compared with steady-state vowels. In the perceptual experiment of this study, listeners match constant /CVC/ stimuli of /bVb/ or /dVd/ to variable /#V#/ stimuli, using a schematic grid on a PC screen. The grid represents an acoustic vowel diagram, and the subjects cha...

One of the first steps infants take in learning their native language is to discover its set of speech-sound categories. This early development is shown when infants begin to lose the ability to differentiate some of the speech sounds their language does not use, while retaining or improving discrimination of language-relevant sounds. However, this aspect of early phonological tuning is not suf...

This study continues an approach that uses a unit selection corpus in order to investigate aspects of the phonetic realization of tonal categories. The focus lies on the peak position of German H*L pitch accents, specifically on the question of whether it is influenced by vowel quality. It is confirmed that vowel backness does not affect peak alignment at all. The distinction between tense and ...

Several behavioral studies have suggested that speakers of languages with variable stress (e.g., Spanish) are better than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French) at discriminating stress contrasts. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. However, when the vowel quality cue is absent, native speake...