As a preliminary step towards conducting a teacher survey on pronunciation teaching in order to design a phonetics course for current and prospective English teachers in Japan, this paper analyses six governmentapproved English textbooks used in junior high schools. The purposes are to examine the types of pronunciation activities in the textbooks and to discuss the knowledge of phonetics requi...

Speech is imperative for human communication. Therefore, phonetics must be considered , along with mechanics and esthetics as the integral factors in contributing to the success of a dental prothesis . Palatal rugae contours have a very important role in phonetics, by production of linguopalatal sounds that involves the contact between tongue and palate. By customizing palatal contours of a max...

Speech perception is remarkably robust. This paper examines how acoustic and auditory properties of vowels and consonants help to ensure intelligibility. First, the source-filter theory of speech production is briefly described, and the relationship between vocal-tract properties and formant patterns is demonstrated for some commonly occurring vowels. Next, two accounts of the structure of pref...

Mandarin has been added to the list of second additional languages (SAL) that South African learners can choose from. The researchers proactively conducted research pertaining SAL (Mandarin) since it is a dynamic phenomenon in Africa. question was formulated as follows: Do factors such 1) phonemic differences between learners’ mother tongue and Chinese, 2) cognitive styles 3) abilities singing ...

We illustrate how a high-dimension feature space typically used in speech technology can be adapted to the phonetic description of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles. In a previous work (Ferragne & Pellegrino, 2010), we carried out a formant investigation of the vowel systems of the British Isles; due to erroneous formant estimation, two-thirds of the speakers had to be left out. The pre...

A new and potentially important method for predicting, analysing and comparing responses of hearing aid algorithms is studied and presented here. This method is based on a timefrequency representation (TFR) generated by a computational auditory model. Hearing impairment is simulated by a change of parameters of the auditory model. To simulate the basilar membrane (BM) filtering part of the audi...

A Silent Speech Interface (SSI) aims at performing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the absence of an intelligible acoustic signal. It can be used as a human-computer interaction modality in high-backgroundnoise environments, such as living rooms, or in aiding speech-impaired individuals, increasing in prevalence with ageing. If this interaction modality is made available for users own nat...

The study was conducted to provide an acoustic description of coronal stops in Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). CE and CF stops differ in VOT and place of articulation. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) between simultaneous and aspirated release; coronal stops are articulated at alveolar place. CF, on the other hand, has a two-way voicing distinc...

Title of dissertation: SYNERGY OF ACOUSTIC-PHONETICS AND AUDITORY MODELING TOWARDS ROBUST SPEECH RECOGNITION Om D. Deshmukh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Carol Y. Espy-Wilson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The problem addressed in this work is that of enhancing speech signals corrupted by additive noise and improving the performance of automatic sp...

Acoustic analysis was used to examine whether speech errors involve lexical, segmental, or sub-featural errors in speech production. Nine participants produced tongue twisters that induced errors between /s/ and /z/ word onsets in contexts where the error outcomes were either words (e.g., sit to zit) or nonwords (e.g., suck to *zuck). Three measurements of the /s/-/z/ contrast were made: (1) pe...