In this study, oral and nasalized vowels were analysed based on Hungarian spontaneous speech corpus. Although such results are generally based on analyses of isolated, read-aloud sentences, the authors suggested it is questionable that they are also true of spontaneous types of speech. There is a lack of agreement in the literature as to which measurable acoustic parameters correlate of nasalit...

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction pat...

Beginning phonetics students are taught that American English has two contrasting reduced vowels, transcribed as [ ́] and [È], illustrated by the unstressed vowels in the minimal pair Rosa’s vs. roses. However little seems to be known about the precise nature or distribution of these vowels. This study explores these questions through acoustic analysis of reduced vowels in the speech of twelve A...

In a study of vowel height perception using front vowels, Hoemeke and Diehl [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 661-674 (1994)] found that F1 - F0 distance was the best predictor of perceived vowel height for the phonological distinction [+/- high], while for two other vowel height distinctions F1 alone was the best predictor. Further, the [+/- high] identification function was defined by a sharp boundary...

In corpus-based speech synthesis, the quality of the synthetic speech critically depends on the speech corpus. Since the high vowel in Japanese might be devoiced in the real speech, we should detect and transcribe them automatically in the corpus construction. In this paper, we apply the HMM-based method, and adopt two kinds of likelihood differences as voicing measures for different focuses. T...

A series of experiments was carried out to investigate the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants following short vowels, long vowels, and schwa in Dutch. Special interest was paid to words such as letter [symbol: see text] "id.," where a short vowel is followed by a single consonant. On phonological grounds one may predict that the first syllable should always be closed, but earlier p...

The human ability to comprehend speech regardless of variation across speakers and accents has long puzzled researchers. Human listeners appear to employ separate mechanisms to cope with speaker versus accent variation. The present study uses event-related potentials (ERP) to test whether such different mechanisms exist at a preattentive level of speech processing. We assessed Australian Englis...

The question whether or not vowel quality can be maintained at F0 of the sounds exceeding statistical F1 of „normal“ speech is still a matter of debate. The present study investigates the perception of long Cantonese vowels /i, y, œ, a, ɔ, u/, spoken and sung in (C)V and (C)V:S context by a well-known female Cantonese Opera singer in the range of F0 of c. 560–860Hz. 172 high-pitched syllables o...

The goal of this study was to compare production differences in consonant-on-vowel coarticulation in accented and unaccented words with the extent to which listeners compensate differently for these coarticulatory effects. Native speakers of German produced nonsense words such as /pʊp/, /pʏp/, /tʊt/, and /tʏt/ that were either accented or unaccented. In a perception experiment, the same speaker...

In this study we investigate vowel reduction and the role of some lexical factors in the production of vowels extracted from a corpus of French conversations. Vowel durations and spectral quality are examined with respect to 1. their interaction in the corpus, 2. the position of vowels in words, and 3. word frequency and word category. The analyses are conducted on vowels produced by 16 speaker...