Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...

In the present study, cortical responses of two sustained Italian vowels, /a/ and /i/, were analyzed in perception and production tasks by using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. First, we showed that the earlier auditory waveform complex, N1/P2, was elicited in both experimental tasks by acoustically presented vowels. More interestingly, the cortical activity of auditory cortex seem...

This study aims at exploring detailed acoustic characteristics of Mandarin sustained vowels based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Cross-sectional area functions of the vocal tract for Mandarin vowels were extracted from volumetric MRI images obtained from eight Chinese speakers (six-male and two-female subjects). Acoustic analysis was performed for the vowels recorded from each speaker. Th...

A database is presented of measurements of the fundamental frequency, the frequencies of the first three formants, and the duration of the 15 vowels of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands (Northern Standard Dutch) and in Belgium (Southern Standard Dutch). The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context (i.e., /sVs/). Recordings were made fo...

Recent studies of spoken Standard Dutch support an ongoing change in the phonetic quality of the diphthong /EI/ [1, 2]. However, there is a need for broader analyses and larger data sets. Here, we took Dutch vowel variants of 44 speakers from a spoken Dutch speech corpus, the CGN [3]. The vowels were measured and compared on the basis of 15.000 vowel segments, consisting of productions of /EI/,...

Vowels are traditionally described as static acoustic targets. This study evaluates the impact of spectral changes on the description of Quebec French tense/lax high vowels. Tense variants are expected in open syllables while lax variants are observed in syllables closed by a non-lengthening consonant. We argue that these contextual variants are more accurately described as trajectories through...

The vowel systems of Catalan and Spanish are considerably different. Spanish has a simple fivevowel symmetrical system, which is the most common number of vowel phonemes cross-linguistically (Hualde, 2005). As shown in Table 1, the vowels contrast along two dimensions: along the height dimension, there are two high vowels (/i/ and /u/), two mid vowels (/e/ and /o/), and one low vowel (/a/); and...

The present study examined a variety of acoustic correlates to the stop length contrast in Finnish beyond the duration of the consonant itself. Of interest were the durations of surrounding vowels, the duration of voice onset time (VOT), and the amplitude of the release burst and the following vowel. Results indicated that for geminate stops, VOT is shorter and the amplitude of both the followi...