Introduction: Aging reduces the ability to understand speech in noise. Hearing rehabilitation is one of the ways to help older people communicate effectively. This study aimed to investigate the effect of vowel auditory training on the improvement of speech-in-noise (SIN) perception among elderly listeners.   Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 36 elderly ...

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

Investigation of spontaneous speech corpora has shown that vowel devoicing in Japanese is a statistical phenomena. However, factors behind vowel devoicing have not been fully studied. In addition, there have been no studies that specifically examined pre-pausal vowel devoicing. In this paper, we investigate vowel devoicing in the pre-pausal position, in particular, vowel devoicing occurring at ...

Six paralinguistic information types uttered by three subjects were examined. Considerable changes were observed in duration, pitch, vowel formant, and voice quality. These findings require some reconsideration of the problems in the phrase phonology of Japanese like mora-based timing and phrase-initial pitch movement. On the other hand, lexically specified phonological features were more robus...

The aim of the study was to investigate gender-dependent differences in the realization of German glottalized vowel onsets. Laryngographic data of semi-spontaneous speech were collected from four male and four female speakers of Standard German. Measurements of relative vocal fold contact duration were carried out including glottalized vowel onsets as well as non-glottalized controls. The resul...

We examined the glottal opening pattern during devoicing environment in Japanese, with respect to the factors that facilitate or suppress devoicing. The factors include consonantal environment, dialects, speech rate, consecutive devoicing environment and phrase final position. The results indicated that glottal opening patterns are twofold: a single phaseand a double phase opening for /CVC/. On...

The distribution of geminate obstruents in Japanese loanwords appears very complex. Some consonants are more prone to gemination than others, on the one hand, and one and the same consonant is more likely to geminate in some phonological contexts than in others, on the other hand. This paper tackles these problems by considering the relationship between consonant gemination in native words and ...

this study examined the phonetic characteristics of persian sentence stress produced by native mandarin chinese speakers. we compared the phonetic correlates of sentence stress, namely fundamental frequency (f0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the production of 8 mandarin chinese speakers and 8 native persian speakers. results indicated that mandarin chinese speakers of persian could di...