A large body of literature has shown that phonemic voicing contrasts are preserved in the production and perception of whispered speech. Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent allophonic voicing is also maintained in whisper. The present study investigates whether a non-contrastive voicing distinction in Spanish fricatives – which results from voice assimilation in obstruent clusters – is a...

In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of Korean pronunciation variations using a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (GTP) system. The GPT system generates pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes in spoken Korean. Experimental results using a PBS (Phonetically Balanced Sentence) Speech DB of 60,000 sentences show that the most...

This study investigates how French listeners exploit phonological and phonetic cues in segmenting continuous speech into words. We examined how these listeners integrate multiple sources of information not only in lexical identification, using the cross-modal priming paradigm, but also in the storage of new lexical representations, using an artificial language learning task. Results showed that...

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...

The paper describes some results of the research which aiming at filling the gap in introducing and promoting computerized speech technology for Slavonic languages, in particular, a technology of TTS synthesis for Belarusian, Polish and Russian. A typological analysis of the peculiarities of phonemic and allophonic systems of Belarussian, Polish and Russian languages is given. Based on the resu...

In Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), elements of two strings (S , S ) belonging to designated representational levels such as (input, output) may become associated through an arbitrary correspondence relation, while constraints like MAX, DEP evaluate such string pairs relative to the set of elementwise correspondences they find. Using some elementary calculations, I show that the ...

English l-sandhi involves an allophonic alternation in alveolar contact for word-final /l/ in connected speech [4]. EPG data for five Scottish Standard English and five Southern Standard British English speakers shows that there is individual and dialectal variation in contact patterns. We analysed vocalisation rate (% of tokens with no alveolar contact) and the area of any residual alveolar co...

It is well known that phonemcs have different acoustic/phonetic realizations depending on the context. Fur example, the p h o n e m e / t / is typically realized with a different allophone (phonetic variant) in syllable initial position than in syllable final position. In syllable initial position (e.g., Tom),/ t / is almost always released (with a strong burst of energy) and aspirated (with h-...

In this paper, I examine the adaptation of English /z/ in 1930s Korean based on a loanword dictionary published in 1937 (Lee 1937). The key findings are that the adaptation pattern in the 1930s is much more variable and shows sensitivity to multiple factors present in the input language, including allophonic details, orthographic representation, and morphological structure. I discuss the implic...

In the context of ASR systems it is of major importance to accurately model the allophonic variations to be faced in a real world task. The evaluation of which pronunciation variants are actually improving the system performance is crucial, as it determines the acceptance of the pronunciation alternatives used. Traditional approaches use different criteria and, typically, evaluation only cares ...