The paper summarises recent research on the interaction of prominence and vowel durations in Finnish, a language with fixed initial stress and a quantity opposition in both vowels and consonants; to be more accurate, the research has been conducted on Northern Finnish. It is shown that, in one-foot words, there are four statistically distinct, non-contrastive duration degrees for phonologically...

This paper examines whether lip protrusion is affected by initial strengthening of rounded vowels in French. Three speakers produced sentences containing the vowels /i, e, ɛ, a, y, ø, œ, u, o, ɔ/ at the beginning of different prosodic constituents: Intonational Phrase (IP), Accentual Phrase (AP) and Word (W). Using video and Qualisys motion capture data, three parameters (lip protrusion, area/l...

English monolinguals and native Spanish speakers of English used a 9-point scale to rate syllable-initial stops for goodness as realizations of the English /p/ category. Voice onset time (VOT) was varied in a set of short-duration ('fast-rate') consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli, and in a set of longer-duration ('slow-rate') CV stimuli. The VOT values ranged from values typical for English /b/ to val...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded from 10 young adults with normal hearing using naturally produced speech contrasts. Consonant-place and vowel-height contrasts were examined in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables by pairing either the consonant /t/ or /p/ with the vowel /I/ or /E/. Vowel-height was also examined as a pseudovowel; one cycle of the vowel segment of a CV was extracted and rep...

Male and female left- and right-handers participated in 3 experiments designed to investigate 3 components of performance asymmetry in lateralized tasks. Experiment 1 used a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) identification task measuring quantitative differences in hemispheric abilities and hemispheric control and qualitative differences in hemispheric strategies. The quantitative data revealed t...

Three experiments, in which Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded in nonsense sequences, examined the perceptual consequences of vowel devoicing in that language. Since vowelless sequences disrupt speech segmentation [Norris et al. (1997). Cognit. Psychol. 34, 191-243], devoicing is potentially problematic for perception. Words in initial position in nonsense sequences were detect...

This study investigates the acoustic and perceptual consequences of nasal coarticulation in American English. Nasalized (coarticulated) vowels were found to be closer in the F1-F2 acoustic vowel space than corresponding oral (non-coarticulated) vowels, indicating that contrast is reduced in the nasal vowel space, relative to the oral vowel space. With respect to perception, listeners are, perha...

A number of studies have shown that mothers hyperarticulate vowels in their Infant Directed Speech to their 6-month-old infants. Here we investigate the possibility that such hyperarticulation might also occur for lexical tone for mother-infant dyads in tone language environments, and possible changes in mothers’ vowel and such tone hyperarticulation in IDS across the infant’s first year. IDS f...