The combination of the retraction of TRAP and the merger of LOT and THOUGHT can be found in a number of English dialects. Gordon (2005) has suggested that the merger of LOT and THOUGHT creates a margin of security in which TRAP may retract, and that TRAP-retraction might therefore be expected to be found anywhere the low-back vowel merger exists. This work presents data showing the combination ...

Identification curves were estimated for the English consonants /b,d,g/ using five-formant CV synthetic stimuli comprehensively sampling the F2 onset-F2 vowel acoustic space in the vicinity of /b,d,g/ locus equations [H. Sussman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 1309-1325 (1991)]. The stimuli included 10 English monophthongal vowel contexts, 11 levels of F2 onset per vowel, and 3 levels of F3 ons...

PURPOSE Ecologically realistic, spontaneous, adult-directed, longitudinal speech data of young children were described by acoustic analyses. METHOD The first 2 formant frequencies of vowels produced by 6 children from different American English dialect regions were analyzed from ages 18 to 48 months. The vowels were from largely conversational contexts and were classified according to diction...

An alternative to the spectral overlap assessment metric (SOAM), first introduced by Wassink [(2006). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(4), 2334-2350], is introduced. The SOAM quantifies the intra- and inter-language differences between long-short vowel pairs through a comparison of spectral (F1, F2) and temporal properties modeled with best fit ellipses (F1 × F2 space) and ellipsoids (F1 × F2 × duration...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of an emerging new framework for understanding early phonetic development – The Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework. The initial support for this framework was the finding that directional asymmetries occur often in infant vowel discrimination. The asymmetries point to an underlying perceptual bias favoring vowels that fall closer to the perip...

Asymmetries in vowel perception occur such that discrimination of a vowel change presented in one direction is easier compared to the same change presented in the reverse direction. Although such effects have been repeatedly reported in the literature there has been little effort to explain when or why they occur. We review studies that report asymmetries in vowel perception in infants and prop...

Early works on Singapore and Malaysian English used to consider them as a single homogeneous entity based on their shared history as previous British colonies. However, since 1965, both Malaysia and Singapore have been independent from each other. It is interesting to investigate, some four decades post-independence, how different the English speech patterns of Malaysians and Singaporeans have ...

The description of vowel variation in the Pittsburgh area was advanced considerably by the description of 13 residents of the city and the surrounding region in Labov et al. 2006, which describes a rotation of vowels in the lower central and back regions identified as the Pittsburgh Chain Shift (PCS). This shift is characterized by a merger of (o) and (oh), as in many dialect regions of the US ...

This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP): first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency (F0). Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowel-intrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, gender-dependent dur...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...