In the past, fundamental linguistic research was typically conducted on small data sets that were handcrafted for the specific research at hand. However, from the eighties onwards, many large spoken language corpora have become available. This study investigates the usefulness of large multi-purpose spoken language corpora for fundamental linguistic research. A research task was designed in whi...

Coarticulation is an important phenomenon that affects the realization of phonetic segments in fluent speech. The effects of coarticulation are prominent in both spectral and temporal domains. Various effects of phonetic contexts on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments have been previously reported based on individual distinctive features (e.g., voiced stops lengthen and unvoiced stop...

In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties (including standard Danish) was assessed among young Danes from Copenhagen. In addition, distances between standard Danish and each of the 17 varieties were measured at the lexical level and at different phonetic levels. In order to determine how well these linguistic levels can predict intelligibility, we c...

This instrumental study of the phonetic contrast between English /ptk/ and /bdg/ produced by Saudi Arabians reveals that native-language phonetic nonTis may carryover to production of target-language sounds. Despite the existence of phonetic interference, however, the present cross-sectional study suggests that Saudi learners gradually approximate the phonetic norms of English, at least insofar...

In this paper we present an approach to introducing more phonetically motivated information into automatic speech recognition in the form of a phonetic ‘expert’. To avoid the curse of dimensionality problem, the expert information is introduced at the level of the acoustic model. Two types of experts are used, each providing discriminative information regarding groups of phonetically related ph...