We investigated categorical perception of rising and falling pitch contours by tonal and non-tonal listeners. Specifically, we determined minimum durations needed to perceive both contours and compared to those of production, how stimuli duration affects their perception, whether there is an intrinsic F0 effect, and how first language background, duration, directions of pitch and vowel quality ...

The effects of orthognatic surgery on the phonetic quality of speech were studied by analyzing acoustic features of vowels. Five men with dentofacial deformities (Class II skeletal deformity) undergoing surgical operation were enrolled in the study. The speech material consisted of 8 vowels (/i/, /y/, /e/, /ø/, /æ/, /a/, /o/, /u/) in sentence context. Every utterance was repeated 10 times in 3 ...

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...

This paper investigates the possibility of describing vowels phonetically using an automated method. Models of the phonetic dimensions of the vowel space are built using two multi-layer perceptrons trained using eight cardinal vowels. The paper aims to improve the positioning of vowels in the open-close dimension by experimenting with a parameter in the model which is the parameter which contro...

1. Introduction Many languages of the world use differences in voice quality or phonation type to contain linguistic functions. Thus, in certain languages, lexical items are differentiated solely on the basis of differences in voice quality. For example, in Jalapa Mazatec, an Otomanguean language spoken in Mexico (Kirk et al. 1993), the three words /ja! / meaning 'tree', /jaª ! / meaning 'he we...

Perception experiments using rising and falling F0 slopes in 4 German word-final opening and closing diphthongs show that closing/opening diphthongs support the perception of falling/ rising pitch movements. The latter effect is suggested to be enhanced when the initial close vowel quality is retracted and rounded. Hence, the current knowledge of the relationship between intrinsic pitch and vow...

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...

This paper describes an articulographic and acoustic pilot study of the realisation of the vowel /iː/ in two regional varieties of Swedish. The study was carried out within the new research project Exotic vowels in Swedish – an articulographic study of palatal vowels [VOKART], which aims at increasing the empirical knowledge of vowel production in general, and extending our knowledge of the art...

This study investigated the developmental change in the phonetic realization of English stress, using corpus data of Japanese English learners with varying proficiency. Previous studies demonstrated that highly proficient Japanese learners of English can produce native-like English lexical stress in terms of intensity, F0, and vowel duration, but not vowel quality. The results of our study show...