Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

Abstract In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by segment /t/. However, at right edge, there another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves final /t/ associated to suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final are derived when stem vowel V position suffix, blocking association This right-edge...

Data on nasal articulation obtained through real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are jointly used with acoustic analyses of the speech signal to analyze nasal production differences in read and spontaneous speech, especially focusing on the details of acoustic spectral reduction. In this exploratory study, vowel-nasal-vowel (VNV) segments from one speaker were examined and measures corres...

The aim of speech recognition is to extract only the linguistic information from speech signals. The acoustic variations caused by non-linguistic factors, such as speaker, communication channel and noise, pose a challenging problem for speech recognition. The same text can lead to different acoustic observations due to different speakers and different environments. To deal with these variations...

This study examines the acoustic realization of two complementary sets of vowels in Shanghai Chinese: One appearing in open syllables only (OSVs) and the other in closed syllables with a glottal coda (PGVs). Two factors consonant onset and prominence level were controlled to test the null hypothesis that PGVs are reduced realization of the OSVs due to their short duration. Results showed spectr...

The present study examined the effect of stress on vowels, specifically duration, formant frequency and acoustic vowel space in CV syllable in Daxi Hakka Chinese. F1 and F2 values were measured at three equidistant time locations. Results show that the absence of stress results in the reduction of vowel duration, which is shortened by 23% in the unstressed condition. The presence of stress affe...

This paper examines how the strategies for L2 production utilized by foreign language learners affect the performance of non-native speech recognition. Producing English consonant clusters are the most problematic for Korean learners of English because of difference between Korean and English phonotactics. The strategies of Korean learners in producing English consonant clusters entail a large ...

Among the key acoustic features attributed with the intelligibility gain of Clear speech are the observed reduction in speaking rate and expansion of vowel space, representing greater articulation and vowel discrimination. Considering the slower speaking rate, previous works have attempted to assess the intelligibility impact of time-scaling casual speech to mimic Clear speech. In a complementa...

There is evidence that coronal contrasts involving retroflexes are less clearly distinguished after a high front vowel /i/ [2, 9]. However, no detailed acoustic studies have been conducted to investigate whether following front vowels affect the contrastiveness of dentals, retroflexes and palatals. We examined the acoustic characteristics of three Punjabi coronal onsets /t̪ ʈ tʃ/ produced before...