The phonological processing skills of 24 pre-lingually deaf 8- and 9-year-old experienced cochlear implant users were measured using a nonword repetition task. The children heard recordings of 20 nonwords and were asked to repeat each pattern as accurately as possible. Detailed segmental analyses of the consonants in the children's imitation responses were carried out. Overall, 39% of the conso...

Japanese infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared on their segmental distributions and consonant-vowel association patterns. Consistent with findings in other languages, a higher ratio of segments that are generally produced early was found in IDS compared to ADS: more labial consonants and low-central vowels, but fewer fricatives. Consonant-vowel associations ...

The quality of static phones (e.g. vowels, fricatives, nasals, laterals) generated by articulatory speech synthesizers has reached a high level in the last years. Our goal is to expand this high quality to dynamic speech, i.e. whole syllables, words, and utterances by re-synthesizing natural acoustic speech data. Re-synthesis means that vocal tract action units or articulatory gestures, describ...

The aims of the study described in this paper are (1) to assess the relative speaker discriminant properties of phonemes and (2) to investigate the importance of the temporal frame-to-frame information for speaker modelling in the framework of a text-prompted speaker verification system using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). It is shown that, with similar experime...

Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Jap...

This study explores the relationship between prosodic strengthening and linguistic contrasts in English by examining temporal realization of nasals in CVN# and #NVC, and their coarticulatory influence on vowels. Results show that different sources of prosodic strengthening bring about different types of linguistic contrasts. Prominence increased N-duration ([nasality]) but the vowel’s [orality]...

This paper presents a phonetic study of the duration of voiceless stops in Campidanese, a Sardinian variety spoken primarily in the south of the island. Only a few Sardinian dialects consider the phonological quantity as a feature to distinguish minimal pairs and this emerges only for selected speech sounds, namely nasals and liquids. The pronunciation of Italian by Sardinian usually shows unex...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become state-of-the-art techniques of automatic speech recognition in the last few years. They can be used at the preprocessing level (Tandem or BottleNeck features) or at the acoustic model level (hybrid Hidden Markov Model/DNN). Moreover, they allow exploiting multilingual data to improve monolingual systems. This paper presents our investigation of the learni...

This study examined perception of multiple coronal places of articulation by native listeners of Western Arrernte. Three main findings emerged. 1) Coronal nasals and laterals are as perceptually robust as coronal stops. 2) Across manners of articulation, apical alveolars are less perceptually robust than other coronals. 3) Formant transitions from a preceding vowel are necessary to correctly id...

In connected speech, initial glides such as /j/ and /w/ often manifest hardly any steady-state formant patterns. In this paper, however, we report data suggesting that, despite their rapid formant movements, glides might have underlyingly static targets. The evidence was revealed when we attempted to determine syllable boundaries involving initial glides as well as the retroflex, using focus-re...