The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory requirements for voiced alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of voiced front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East Cushitic)....

We explore the acoustics of Greek voiced stops produced by 2and 3year-old Greek-acquiring children and compare them with adult patterns, in order to understand developmental universals in the mastery of phonation-type contrast. A truly voiced stop (i.e., one realized with voicing onset before the burst), is a difficult sound because the buildup of supralaryngeal air pressure during stop closure...

Fifty-six Portuguese speakers born and raised in Brazil produced words beginning one of four plosives, /p b k ?/. Twenty-eight them were monolinguals (controls), the rest learners English as a foreign language (EFL). The also asked to produce with We measured plosives’ voice onset times (VOT) address following research questions: Do foreign-language learners, whose exposure native oral input is...

The present study investigated the acquisition of French stop consonants in English-speaking children who attend a French immersion elementary school in Alberta, Canada. Both languages have voiced and voiceless stops, but in English the distinction is phonetically realized as short-lag vs. long-lag VOTs, while in French it is as lead vs. short-lag VOTs. Examining the development of stops in thi...

Due to the limited number of cochlear implantees speaking Mandarin Chinese, it is extremely difficult to evaluate new speech coding algorithms designed for tonal languages. Access to an intelligibility index that could reliably predict the intelligibility of vocoded (and non-vocoded) Mandarin Chinese is a viable solution to address this challenge. The speech-transmission index (STI) and coheren...

Abstract The present study uses an acoustic analysis to examine the effects of implicit and explicit pronunciation instruction on acquisition German final devoicing in L2 classroom. Twenty-nine English-speaking learners at a North American university were assigned or condition. Learner speech samples recorded, following pre/post/delayed-post-test design. Four correlates medial obstruent voicing...

Recent research suggests speech perception processes are flexible. For example, Norris et al. [Norris D, McQueen JM, & Cutler A (2003). Cognit. Psychol., 47, 204-238] demonstrated that listeners trained on stimuli containing ambiguous /s/-/f/ tokens subsequently showed an appropriate shift in their /s/-/f/ categorization boundaries based on the lexicality of the training stimuli. The present st...