This paper examines the acoustic correlates of the geminate consonants of Cypriot Greek. Several measurements were obtained, including target segment duration, preceding vowel duration and quality, RMS for the geminates themselves, and voice quality differences in their production. It was found that for the segments whose duration can be most easily prolonged (i.e. /l/, nasals and fricatives) t...

Very often in signal analysis it is necessary to determine certain points in the signal waveform as anchor points for the processing. . This paper proposes a strategy to fmd automatically the voice onset for initial vowels, the burst point for voiceless and voiced stops and the release point for nasals. The presented approach exploits only the information inherent in the waveform of the signal ...

We investigate a statistical model for integrating narrowband cues in speech. The model is inspired by two ideas in human speech perception: (i) Fletcher’s hypothesis (1953) that independent detectors, working in narrow frequency bands, account for the robustness of auditory strategies, and (ii) Miller and Nicely’s analysis (1955) that perceptual confusions in noisy bandlimited speech are corre...

PURPOSE This study aimed to determine nasalance values for syllables produced by Brazilian Portuguese speakers of different ages and gender. METHODS Nasalance scores were collected for 14 syllables (10 orals and 4 nasals) using Nasometer II 6400. The participants were 245 Brazilian Portuguese speakers (121 males and 124 females), both genders, divided into four age groups: 57 children, 61 ado...

Speaking is generally considered efficient in that less effort is spent articulating more redundant items. With efficient speech production, less reduction is expected in the pronunciation of phonemes that are more important (distinctive) for word identification. The importance of a single phoneme in word recognition can be quantified as the information (in bits) it adds to the preceding word o...

This paper presents jaw movement data for the coronal consonants of Central Arrernte. It compares jaw movement for stops with jaw movement for nasals and laterals, across dental, alveolar, retroflex and alveo-palatal places of articulation. Results suggest that when there is a clear spectral peak for the release burst, as is the case primarily for the palatal, but also for the alveolar and retr...

In the project HERON, we developed a framework for articulatory speech synthesis for European Portuguese. The system combines several modules, developed or adapted in the project. The Linguistic Processing model uses new syllabification and grapheme-to-phone modules developed in the project. The construction of the gestural scores is performed using an adapted version of TADA (TAsk Dynamic Appl...

This is an extension of earlier work on vocal tract area function modelling (Fant, 1960, 1992, 1993; Lin, 1990) retaining a minimum of three independent control parameters in a more complex, physiologically oriented model providing a flexible choice of detail structure. Systematic perturbation analysis of vocal tract boundary conditions and of values of the independent control parameters have b...

To establish a perceptually valid rule for the durational control of synthetic speech, it is necessary to know the degree to which a given temporal error or distortion is acceptable to human listeners. Two perceptual experiments were conducted to estimate the acceptability of modifications in either vocalic or consonantal durations as a function of two attributes of the modified portions, i.e.,...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been used to measure the shape of the vocal tract during speech in several recent studies. Its safety to the subject, high quality imaging of soft tissue, and the ability to select relatively thin imaging planes at any angle are significant advantages over other imaging methods used for speech research. The most significant disadvantage is the long exposure ...