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...

A comparison of babbling and early speech, word patterns of languages, and, in one instance, a protolanguage corpus, reveals three basic movement patterns: (1) a 'Frame' provided by the cycles of mandibular oscillation underlying the basic mouth close-open alternation of speech; this Frame appears in relatively 'pure' form in the tendency for labial consonants to co-occur with central vowels; (...

during pregnancy, the need of mother and fetus to iron gradually increases and will reach at its most level at the end of the pregnancy. this study was preformed to evaluate the knowledge and practice of pregnant women in fars province about supplements containing iron intake. data collection was a questionnaire completed by face to face interview using simple nonrandom sampling method in 2997 ...

due to the importance of correct posture for preventing musculoskeletal disorders, the purpose of this study was to evaluate theory of planned behavior in predicting correct body posture in operating room nurses.in this cross-sectional study, participants (n=100) were nurses from five hospitals located in northern iran. participants completed demographic data and theory of planned behavior cons...

Due to a lack of authentic learning resources, Chinese students often do not receive native pronunciation models in their classes. This study provided with an approach improve English pronunciation, specifically sound more like British Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GAEP). The proposes word stress prediction rules help non-native learners predict the primary words, improving v...

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...

Performance-based studies on the psychological nature of linguistic competence can conceal significant differences in the brain processes that underlie native versus nonnative knowledge of language. Here we report results from the brain activity of very proficient early bilinguals making a lexical decision task that illustrates this point. Two groups of Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (Spanish...