A combined vowel perception/vowel production study was designed to address the question of how variability in speech production relates to variability in speech perception. For the study, participants from three different U.S. dialect regions (North, South and West) completed an online vowel identification experiment. A subset of participants from each region also provided speech samples. In th...

Recent studies have demonstrated that mothers exaggerate phonetic properties of infant-directed (ID) speech. However, these studies focused on a single acoustic dimension (frequency), whereas speech sounds are composed of multiple acoustic cues. Moreover, little is known about how mothers adjust phonetic properties of speech to children with hearing loss. This study examined mothers' production...

This study investigated the significant acoustic cues used in the perception of aspiration contrast in Cantonese initial stops by normal hearing adults. The effects of vowel characteristics, aspiration noise level and voice-onset time (VOT) duration on aspiration perception in Cantonese initial stops were studied. The stimuli were consonant-vowel (CV) real words recorded by a male Cantonese nat...

This paper examines the influence of the first language on the accuracy with which trained phoneticians judge isolated monophthongs taken from the phoneme systems of two different languages. The main finding of this study was that the speaker’s as well as listener’s L1 background have a significant influence on judgements which were made by means of the IPA vowel diagram. This paper consists of...

This paper examines the acoustic and articulatory aspects of vowel production in Ningbo Chinese. Frequency results show that ten normal-length vowels can be well distinguished by four levels of vowel height and two levels of vowel backness in an acoustic F1/F2 plane. Acquired EMA data show that there is no clear correlation between vowel height and articulatory parameters. Results from a PARAFA...

Infants preferentially discriminate native speechsound categories prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for distributional learning strategies in phoneme learning. However, it is unknown how infants extract the vowel phonemes of their language from distributional information in the presence of between-speaker variability in vowel realizations. Before we can ask ...

Previous studies suggested that the synesthesia-like coloured hearing could be found in nonsynesthetic population for both vowel quality and pitch. The vowel-colour and pitch-colour associations were investigated separately so it is unclear whether vowel quality or pitch has a stronger effect on crossmodal colour association, and how they may interact. No study has investigated this phenomenon ...

Cross-language research on adult speech perception demonstrates a strong effect of linguistic experience on consonant perception but not on vowel perception. Our paper re-examines the effect of linguistic experience on adults’ vowel perception. First, identification and goodness functions for the high front quadrant of the vowel space were mapped for speakers of Swedish, English, and Spanish. S...

In this paper, the acoustic correlates of the labial and alveolar place of articulation for both plosive and fricative consonants are investigated, and the results are analyzed in terms of vowel context, voicing and manner of articulation. Several measurements, including formant and noise measurements, are reported for CVs spoken by two male and two female talkers. It was found that the spectra...

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences, but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between ch and tch is determined by the preceding vowel (coach, roach vs. catch, hatch). We investigated children’s sensitivity to vowel context when spelling consonants in monosyllabic nonwords. Children in grade two (s...