The present study concerns the durational properties of minimal Dutch word pairs containing long and short vowels as a specific case study of the mapping between phonological and phonetic notions of timing. In Experiment 1, duration of the postvocalic stop consonant in CV( : ) Cən words did not vary as a function of preceding vowel length. Experiment 2 extended this finding to intervocalic stop...

Both historical sound change and laboratory confusion studies show strong asymmetries of consonant confusions. In particular, /ki/ commonly changes to /ti/, and /pi/ to /ti/, but not the reverse. It is hypothesized that such asymmetries arise when two sounds are acoustically similar except for one or more differentiating cues, which are subject to a highly directional perceptual error. This per...

Research on perceptual epenthesis in Japanese has revealed high back [ɯ] to be the vowel commonly perceived in illicit consonant sequences. However, loanword studies suggest that there are three epenthetic vowels, which reflect phonotactic restrictions on certain consonant + vowel sequences. Expanding previous perception studies, this paper investigates the extent to which perceptual epenthesis...

In Kannada language there are more than 510 character sets to be recognized including the vowels, consonants, consonant modified by vowel and consonant conjuncts the classification of characters becomes difficult. In this paper we present a new classification method of Kannada characters which can be used as a preliminary step for recognition. An analysis of Kannada characters was done and synt...

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical ac...

Several previous studies have investigated the extent to which segmental detail is represented in the developing lexicon. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on consonant and vowel representation, with little attention to the representation of lexicon tone in spite of its predominance in languages of the world. The current research provides a direct comparison of vowels, cons...

The sound system of Inari Saami exhibits a threeway quantity contrast which is similar to some other Finno-Ugric languages – Estonian and Livonian – in several respects. In all these languages the domain of ternary quantity is a disyllabic foot where the first syllable is stressed and the second syllable is unstressed. In this study we investigate the realisation of the ternary quantity contras...

In this paper, we present a state-space formulation of a neuralnetwork-based hidden dynamic model of speech whose parameters are trained using an approximate EM algorithm. The training makes use of the results of an off-the-shelf formant tracker (during the vowel segments) to simplify the complex sufficient statistics that would be required in the exact EM algorithm. The trained model, consisti...

A series of vowel-identification experiments using gated consonant stimuli shows that English listeners are capable of recovering the vocalic context in which a consonant appears from information contained in the consonant alone. This is true for most consonants tested, including liquids, nasals, and stops in onset and coda position. Positional asymmetries in vowel sensitivity go in opposite di...

The present study is an experimental investigation of the effects of prosodic variables on segmental durations in Greek. Nonsense disyllabic CVCV words were produced in a carrier sentence under different conditions of stress, focus and tempo. The results indicate: (1) the intrinsic durations of vowels are rather canonical in the order /iu<eo<a/; (2) the adjacent consonant /s/ shows complementar...