This paper proposes a scheme of using F0 contours of vowel nuclei to discriminate Chinese lexical tones. The authors suggest that the F0 contour fragment of a vowel nucleus of a syllable contributes most to tone perception of the syllable. To correlate the F0 contour with the phonemic components of a syllable, a tone-based syllabic structure is also proposed. Tone recognition experiments on a s...

Co-speech hand gestures are a type of multimodal input that has received relatively little attention in the context of second language learning. The present study explored the role that observing and producing different types of gestures plays in learning novel speech sounds and word meanings in an L2. Naïve English-speakers were taught two components of Japanese-novel phonemic vowel length con...

This paper describes the framework of a Korean phonological knowledge base system using the unificationbased grammar formalism : Korean Phonology Structure Grammar (KPSG). The approach of KPSG provides an explicit development model for constructing a computational phonological system : speech recognition and synthesis system. We show that the proposed approach is more describable than other app...

This paper looks at stress assignation for unknown foreign words read aloud by Scottish subjects. The syllable structure and syllable weight of the written words is examined, to determine where stress is most likely to be placed according to English stress rules, and the stress rules for the languages of origin of the words are also described. The stress patterns in the spoken responses are the...

Two experiments tested the role of syllable frequency in word recognition, recently suggested in Spanish, in another shallow orthography, German. Like in Spanish, word recognition performance was inhibited in a lexical decision and a perceptual identification task when the first syllable of a word was of high frequency. Given this replication of the inhibitory effect of syllable frequency in a ...

It is proposed that syllable weight is driven by considerations of phonetic effectiveness and phonological simplicity. The phonetically best distinctions are claimed to be those which divide syllables into groups which are phonetically most distinct from each other. Phonologically complex distinctions are those which exceed an upper threshold in the number of phonological predicates to which th...

It is well known that natural languages share certain aspects of their design. For example, across languages, syllables like blif are preferred to lbif. But whether language universals are myths or mentally active constraints-linguistic or otherwise-remains controversial. To address this question, we used fMRI to investigate brain response to four syllable types, arrayed on their linguistic wel...

This paper investigates the potential role of syllabic structure in characterising the informational content of running speech using an energy-based measure (the cochlea-scaled entropy, CSE index). We computed the CSE and compared how it aligned to the energy envelope for a corpus of English and Spanish sentences. We also compared these measures to syllabic structure, which differs markedly bet...

this article addresses the phonetic and phonological representation of h- phrase accent in the tonal structure of persian pre-nuclear accents. in an experimental study, three groups of pre-nuclear accentual phrases, namely, phrases with antepenultimate, penultimate and final stress pattern, were selected for tonal examination. materials were designed so as to yield under-pressure and pressure f...

This paper describes a novel design of neural network based speech recognition system for isolated Cantonese syllables. Since Cantonese is a monosyllabic and tonal language, the recognition system consists of a tone recognizer and a base syllable recognizer. The tone recognizer adopts the architecture of multi-layer perceptron in which each output neuron represents a particular tone. The syllab...