Twelve Dutch vowels, each pronounced by 50 male speakers, were analyzed in 18 filter bands comparable in bandwidth with the cat's critical band. By considering the sound levels (in decibels) in these filter bands as dimensions, with a principal-component analysis the 18 dimensions per sound were reduced to four factors which together explain 75% of the total variance. The configuration of the a...

The present work reviews theories and empirical findings, including results from two new experiments, that bear on the perception of English vowels, with an emphasis on the comparison of data analytic "machine recognition" approaches with results from speech perception experiments. Two major sources of variability (viz., speaker differences and consonantal context effects) are addressed from th...

The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for th...

BACKGROUND Studies addressing the identification of sung vowels concern mainly the effect of the fundamental frequency (f0) and conclude that correct vowel identification decreases with increasing pitch. In one experiment, the impact of consonantal environment on the intelligibility of the vowels in high-pitched singing was also studied. The results of that experiment showed positive effect of ...

In this study we compare the ESTER corpus of journalistic speech [1] and the NCCF corpus of spontaneous speech [2] in terms of duration, f0 and spectral reduction in productions automatically detected as speech units between pauses. Continuation f0 rises are overall absent in spontaneous speech and speech units reveal a declination slope with less amplitude than in journalistic speech. For both...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comparison of journalistic and spontaneous speech: analysis of sequences between pauses. In this study we compare the ESTER corpus of journalistic speech (Galliano et al., 2005) and the NCCF corpus of spontaneous speech (Torreira et al, 2010) in terms of duration, f0 and spectral reduction i...

This study investigates non-native speech rhythm in German. Three native speakers and 18 learners of German with three different native languages were recorded reading and re-telling a story. Vowel reduction and deletion was analyzed in one particular type of German suffix. Speech rhythm was investigated with the syllable ratio, a new measurement which determines the mean ratio of durational re...

Intra-gestural and inter-gestural coordination in German word-initial consonant clusters /kl, kn, ks, pl, ps/ is investigated in four speakers by means of EMA as a function of segmental make-up and prosodic variation, i.e. prosodic boundary strength and lexical stress. Segmental make-up is shown to determine the extent of articulatory overlap of the clusters, with /kl/ exhibiting the highest de...

In Tokyo Japanese, vowel devoicing is a common process, that leads to the reduction of high, unstressed vowels ( and ) between unvoiced consonants. This article investigates to what extent native Japanese speakers (L1) learning German as foreign language (L2) show a strong tendency to produce these vowels in the foreign language as devoiced, too. Furthermore, the question is addressed whe...