Four experiments investigated the role of the syllable in Chinese spoken word production. Chen, Chen and Ferrand (2003) reported a syllable priming effect when primes and targets shared the first syllable using a masked priming paradigm in Chinese. Our Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Chen et al.'s (2003) Experiment 3 employing CV (e.g., ,/ba2.ying2/, strike camp) and CVG (e.g., ,/bai2....

It has been generally claimed that every language has syllables with onsets (CV structure), while languages may or may not allow coda consonants (VC structure). While recent work on Arrernte (Breen & Pensalfini, 1999) has cast doubt on the absolute universality of onsets, it is clear that there is a significant cross-linguistic preference for CV structure (Clements & Key-ser, 1983; Clements, 19...

Spectral degradation reduces access to the acoustics of spoken language and compromises how learners break into its structure. We hypothesised that spectral degradation disrupts word segmentation, but that listeners can exploit other cues to restore detection of words. Normalhearing adults were familiarised to artificial speech that was unprocessed or spectrally degraded by noise-band vocoding ...

The aim of this study is to determine whether fluent and non-fluent aphasics preserve the acoustic marks of lexical stress in a repetition task involving regular oxytone and paroxytone disyllabic Spanish words in isolation. Acoustic analyses of each syllable (duration, F0, intensity) were performed. These data were then subjected to mixed-effects regression analyses, separately for oxytones and...

A computational model of emergent syllable systems is developed based on a set of functional constraints on syllable systems and the assumption that language structure emerges through cumulative change over time. The constraints were derived from general communicative factors as well as from the phonetic principles of perceptual distinctiveness and articulatory ease. Through evolutionary optimi...

Pronunciation in spontaneous Mandarin speech tends to be much more variable than in read speech. In current recognition systems, pronunciation dictionaries usually only contain one standard pronunciation for each word, so that the amount of variability that can be modelled is very limited. Most recent research work for modelling variations in spontaneous speech focuses on the lexicon level, whi...

We present computer software for automated, high throughput, quantitative syllable-level analysis of bird song syntax. The primary advantage of our tool is the ease and effectiveness it provides in quantifying syllable sequence and performing a comparison of syllable sequence from one day of singing with one or more other days of singing. The software utilizes the output of the Feature Batch mo...

This paper examines the tonal structure of yes-no questions in Chaha, using the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology. Yes-no questions can be formed in two ways: lengthening the final syllable or attach the question suffix to the final word. They exhibit different F0 patterns at the end of the utterance. We propose that the same underlying tonal structure is realized different...