The issue of the effect of consonant manner on the perceptibility of laryngeal contrast was addressed. Previous studies of perceptual confusion suggest that, in noise, the laryngeal contrast in fricatives is more difficult to perceive than stops for listeners in English, which is typologically classified as an “aspirating” language. The present study examined whether a similar pattern is observ...

Gujarati and White Hmong are among a small handful of languages known to maintain a phonemic contrast between breathy and modal voice across both obstruents and vowels. Given that breathiness on stop consonants is realized as a breathy-voiced aspirated release into the following vowel, how is consonant breathiness distinguished from vocalic breathiness, if at all? We examine acoustic and electr...

In corpus-based speech synthesis, the quality of the synthetic speech critically depends on the speech corpus. Since the high vowel in Japanese might be devoiced in the real speech, we should detect and transcribe them automatically in the corpus construction. In this paper, we apply the HMM-based method, and adopt two kinds of likelihood differences as voicing measures for different focuses. T...

The variation of English pronunciations as a result geographic proximity, or commonly known regional dialects is literary phenomenon that occurs worldwide. Due to the first language being Malay, most native Terengganu Malay (TrgM) speakers experience difficulties in employing Standard (SE) conversation. These dialectal features which are caused by mother tongue interference become more apparent...

This paper examines two plausible mechanisms supporting sound category adaptation: directional shifts towards the novel pronunciation or a general relaxation of criteria. Focusing on asymmetries in adaptation to voicing patterns English coronal fricatives, we suggest that typology synchronic experience affect adaptation. A corpus study fricative substitution confirmed North American listeners a...

This paper reports on a heretofore undescribed pattern of voicelessness dissimilation in the Kordofanian language Moro. Voiceless obstruents become voiced when preceding another voiceless obstruent in a transvocalic (≈CVC) configuration. This pattern is robust and productive across multiple morphological contexts. The phonetic facts of voicing in Moro show it to be a difference between prevoice...

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perc...

This paper presents a first phonetic analysis of voiced, devoiced and ejectivized stop sounds in Setswana taken from two different speech databases. It is observed that rules governing the voicing/devoicing processes depend on sociophonetic and ethnolinguistic factors. Speakers, especially women, from the rural North West area of South Africa tend to preserve the phonologically stronger devoice...

This paper addresses the presence and type of consonant distortions in speech of 79 French speakers with dysarthria due to Parkinson’s disease (PD), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and cerebellar ataxia (CA), and 26 control speakers. A total of 4990 consonants including selected occurrences of /d/, /g/, /t/, /k/ and /s/ in CV word-initial syllables, and /t/ in CV word medial and IP initial ...

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [character: see text] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[character: see text]k, [character: see text] t, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization an...