The present paper deals with the problem of quality and quantity change (reduction) of unstressed vowels in Russian depending on their position relative to the stressed syllable and to the word boundaries. Quality change is measured by calculating the probability of vowel omission or replacement by another vowel phoneme. The study is based on a large corpus of read speech (over 30 hours). The r...

A perception experiment on stop consonant voicing in (C)V1CV2 was conducted to test the effects of the preceding vowel. Five types of /ki/ as CV1 differing in closure voicing, vowel duration and vowel devoicing were spliced with a da-ta VOT continuum as CV2. Subjects’ judgment between the spliced kita and kida along a VOT range was compared with that of ta and da in isolation. Strong effects of...

As a result of the cooperation in the Intas 915 project, annotated speech corpora have become available in three different languages for both read and spontaneous speech of some 4-5 male and 4-5 female speakers per language (6-10 minutes per speaker). These data have been used to study the effects of redundancy on acoustic vowel reduction, in terms of vowel duration, F1-F2 distance to a virtual...

The study investigates the effect of speech rate on the temporal organization of syllable production of in Hong Kong Cantonese. The results show that all the component segments of the test syllables, including the vowel-nasal transitions and elementelement transitions in the diphthongs, contribute to the reduction of the entire syllable durations in fast speech. While the percentages of duratio...

This paper provides an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of a number of Russian vowel reduction patterns. In particular, the analysis presented here relies on a non-unitary approach (Crosswhite 1999) to two-pattern vowel reduction systems, such as those typically seen in Russian dialects. Furthermore, a particularly complex dialectal pattern, traditionally referred to as "dissimilative" reduction, ...

Vowel reduction suppresses phonetic information in the speech signal and should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological representations. Reduction follows two apparently contradictory routes in vowel space, yielding either centralised values (the ‘centripetal’ pattern) or the corner values a, i, u (the ‘centrifugal’ pattern). What unifies these vowels is the relative simplic...

Eight speakers (4 male and 4 female) of the Muskogee dialect of Creek pronounced a set of words illustrating the vowels and diphthongs of Creek. These recordings were analyzed acoustically and data on vowel duration and vowel formant frequencies are presented in this paper. The ratio of the durations of dictinctively long and short vowels was 1.8. This ratio showed a sex difference, being large...

This study examines phonetic variation in the acoustic properties of the French /i,e,a,o,u/ sub-system as a function of vowel duration and speech style in order to better understand the interplay between these two well-known factors of vowel reduction. Over 1000k vowels extracted from three large corpora of continuous French including read speech (BREF), partly scripted journalistic speech (EST...

This paper proposes an analysis of phonological vowel reduction according to which vowel contrasts are subject to neutralization in unstressed syllables because it is more difficult to keep vowels distinct where vowel duration is shorter. Where the durational difference between stressed and unstressed vowels is large enough, it may not be possible to realize the same number of vowel contrasts i...