A new articulatory synthesizer (SAPWindows), with a modular and flexible design, is described. A comprehensive acoustic model and a new interactive glottal source were implemented. Perceptual tests and simulations made possible by the synthesizer contributed to deepen our knowledge of one of the most important characteristics of European Portuguese, the nasal vowels. First attempts at incorpora...

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants. Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with back vowels. The fourth pa...

The goal of this paper is twofold: first it reviews the distributional properties of tense and lax vowels in a relatively standard dialect of Northern French which still contrasts vowel length, and second, on the basis of these data, it examines the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993). The intricate interplay between vow...

The value of the first formant of high back and high front vowels (/u/ and /i/) has been determined for near minimal pairs in a 30-language sample. It is found that for 29 out of 30 languages the average of the first formant is higher for high back vowels than for high front vowels, and that for 26 out of 28 languages the majority of minimal pairs has a high back vowel with higher first formant...

Acoustic analyses were conducted to identify the characteristics that differentiate the glides /j,w/ from adjacent vowels. These analyses were performed on a recorded database of intervocalic glides, produced naturally by two male and two female speakers in controlled vocalic and prosodic contexts. Glides were found to differ significantly from adjacent vowels through RMS amplitude reduction, f...

The purpose of the study is to obtain measurements of the formant frequencies of the 7 long vowels [i... y... E... {... a... O... u...] in the (C)V: syllables and 7 half-long vowels [i y E { a O u] in the (C)V:S syllables, and 4 short vowels [I å ∏ U] in the (C)VS syllables in Cantonese. Results show that (1) in the F1/F2 plane the half-long vowels except [a] are centralized relative to the lon...

For the development of Human Language Technologies such as automatic speech recognition systems or text-to-speech systems, exact acoustic and phonological information of the language in question is essential. In the case of Southern Sotho, the current study is a first step in the direction of providing such information. Measurements of the frequencies of the first two formants of the vowels rep...

Six experiments explored why the identification of the two members of a pair of diotic, simultaneous, steady-state vowels improves with a difference in fundamental frequency (delta F0). Experiment 1 confirmed earlier reports that a delta F0 improves identification of 200-ms but not 50-ms duration "double vowels"; identification improves up to 1 semitone delta F0 and then asymptotes. In such sti...

In this paper we give some preliminary results of a series of listening exper­ iments which have been conducted as part of a larger study on speaker normalization. Of all possible aspects of normalization we want to consider especially the perceptual aspects which concern speaker variation. In a series of eight listening experiments we have investigated how well listeners can recognize vowels f...

Using cross-linguistic evidence from the relationship of epenthetic vowel choice to the vowel system of a given language, this paper proposes a set of context-free markedness constraints on vowel features. Universally ranked constraints yield the result that front vowels are more marked than back and that round vowels are marked; languages may vary in how they rank the markedness of low and non...