in this paper, the validity of the key prediction of adaptive dispersion theory was tested. according to this prediction, vowels of a given language are organized in such a way that they are sufficiently distinct on the perceptual level. it implies that more crowded inventories, which also have wider f1 dimension, occupy greater vowel spaces than inventories with fewer vowels.  to investigate t...

acoustic analysis of sounds produced during speech provides significant information about the physiology of larynx and vocal tract. the analysis of voice power spectrum is a fundamental sensitive method of acoustic assessment that provides valuable information about the voice source and characteristics of vocal tract resonance cavities. the changes in long-term average spectrum (ltas) spectral ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of reduced vowel working space on dysarthric talkers' speech intelligibility using both acoustic and perceptual approaches. In experiment 1, the acoustic-perceptual relationship between vowel working space area and speech intelligibility was examined in Mandarin-speaking young adults with cerebral palsy. Subjects read aloud 18 bisyllabic words...

The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of work leading to the view that vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) plays a significant role in vowel perception. The view that implicitly guided vowel perception research for many years was the idea that nearly all of the information that was needed to specify vowel quality was to be found in a cross section of the vowel spectrum sampl...

Morphophonological alternations in English words such as able versus ability involve changes in both stress and vowel quality. This study examined how native speakers of Spanish and English produced four such morphologically related English word pairs. Degree of stress and vowel quality was assessed auditorily and instrumentally. Stress placement generally seemed to constitute less of a learnin...

Previous studies have shown that some English vowel contrasts remain difficult for English learners to perceive. This study investigated three potential factors affecting vowel perception: cross-language vowel systems, spectral distance, and language proficiency, for the discrimination and identification of English /ɪ/-/ε/, /ε/-/æ/, /ʊ/-/ʌ/, and /ʌ/-/ɒ/ contrasts in four groups of listeners: L1...

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In Experiment 1, the orthographic vowel differed from the ...

This study examines phonetic variation in the acoustic properties of the French /i,e,a,o,u/ sub-system as a function of vowel duration and speech style in order to better understand the interplay between these two well-known factors of vowel reduction. Over 1000k vowels extracted from three large corpora of continuous French including read speech (BREF), partly scripted journalistic speech (EST...

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabi...

Results from a large-scale comparative study of vowel formant normalization methods are presented. Effectiveness of methods was evaluated by their ability to improve the equalization and alignment of speaker vowel spaces over raw Hertz measurements. Vowel-intrinsic methods performed poorly, while vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic methods performed the best overall.