The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found, likely due to a transfer of native phonological fea...

The vowel systems of Catalan and Spanish are considerably different. Spanish has a simple fivevowel symmetrical system, which is the most common number of vowel phonemes cross-linguistically (Hualde, 2005). As shown in Table 1, the vowels contrast along two dimensions: along the height dimension, there are two high vowels (/i/ and /u/), two mid vowels (/e/ and /o/), and one low vowel (/a/); and...

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants. Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with back vowels. The fourth pa...

Speakers can adopt a speaking style that allows them to be understood more easily in difficult communication situations, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of clearly produced consonants in detail. This study attempts to characterize the adaptations in the clear production of American English fricatives in a carefully controlled range of communication situations. Ten female a...

The objective of this study is to identify the reflection vowels phoneme Pesisir Sibolga languages. This applies qualitative top-down approaches. Observation and questioner are applied. has 6 participants. finds inherited linearly in beginning, middle, last position a word process innovation middle word. Vowels linearly: (in position), i u position)) innovation: ( middle), e beginning middle).

Arabic, the world’s second most spoken language in terms of number of speakers, has not received much attention from the traditional speech processing research community. This study is specifically concerned with the analysis of vowels in modern standard Arabic dialect. The first and second formant values in these vowels are investigated and the differences and similarities between the vowels e...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if fluent early bilinguals who are highly experienced in their second language (L2) can produce L2 vowels in a way that is indistinguishable from native speakers' vowels. The subjects were native speakers of Italian who began learning English when they immigrated to Canada as children or adults ('early' vs. 'late' bilinguals). The early bilinguals ...

The paper addresses the question of native speakers’ online awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of surface vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant. In a cross-modal forced-choice experiment, we investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is represented and that t...

Our study investigated the pitch and duration properties of word stress in a large speech corpus. We concluded that pitch and duration play different roles in distinguishing word-level stress classes. In the case of pitch, primary-stress vowels were different from secondary-stress and reduced vowels; in the case of duration, reduced vowels were different from the other two types of vowels.