The purpose of the study is to obtain measurements of the formant frequencies of the 7 long vowels [i... y... E... {... a... O... u...] in the (C)V: syllables and 7 half-long vowels [i y E { a O u] in the (C)V:S syllables, and 4 short vowels [I å ∏ U] in the (C)VS syllables in Cantonese. Results show that (1) in the F1/F2 plane the half-long vowels except [a] are centralized relative to the lon...

To produce near-native American English (AE) vowels, Japanese speakers must extend their five vowel system with at least six new vowels. Three experiments have been conducted to acquire both perceptual and acoustic measures about Japanese accented English (JE)vowels. Six non-back vowels of AE in several phonetic environments were recorded from four Japanese male talkers with moderate English sk...

This paper examines to what extent acoustic similarity between native and non-native vowels predicts non-native vowel perception and whether this process is influenced by listeners' native and other non-native dialects. Listeners with Northern and Southern British English dialects completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they categorized tokens of 15 Dutch vowels in terms of English vo...

This study compares velar movements for nasal vowels and consonants; it investigates contextual nasalisation; and it provides new data on how nasalisation is affected by speech rate. Velar position is measured with an electromagnetic articulatograph (EMA) for two French speakers. Our results confirm that (i) nasal vowels are produced with a lower velum height than nasal consonants; (ii) the con...

This project investigates the articulatory properties of German vowels on the basis of tagged Cine-MRI data. German has 15 monophthongs, which are classified into seven tense-lax pairs. Understanding the phonetic correlate of vowel tenseness has proven elusive, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining global shape information for the tongue, especially the pharyngeal portion. Tagged Cine-MRI a...

The velopharyngeal opening (VPO) is analyzed in 17 professional operatic singers, 3 high sopranos, 3 sopranos, 2 mezzo-sopranos, 3 tenors, 2 baritones, 2 bass-baritones, and 2 basses singing the vowels [a, i, u] at middle degree of vocal loudness at different pitches throughout their pitch range. Three methods were used for detection of a VPO. One was nasofiberscopy, which revealed VPO of vario...

Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been a...

Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...