The intelligibility of speech having either a single "hole" in various bands or having two "holes" in disjoint or adjacent bands in the spectrum was assessed with normal-hearing listeners. In experiment 1, the effect of spectral "holes" on vowel and consonant recognition was evaluated using speech processed through six frequency bands, and synthesized as a sum of sine waves. Results showed a mo...

An acoustic impedance spectrometer was used to measure the frequencies R1 and R2 of the first two resonances of the vocal tract. The measurement was made just outside the mouth, in parallel with the free field, using a new technique that provides precise information about the acoustic response of the vocal tract in real time. Values measured for native speakers for a particular vowel were used ...

Nasal coda emergence (NCE) (sometimes referred to as “restoration”) is the process by which a nasal vowel develops an excrescent nasal coda which may or may not have been present in an earlier form of the spoken language. NCE is operative in the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) dialect of Brazilian Portuguese (CBP), an Ibero-Romance language with five phonemically nasal vowels. The output of NCE (in th...

Many pre-hispanic languages in Mexico, including the Zapotec language, are faced with the real possibility of extinction in the near future. There are many reasons for this, such as the younger indigenous populations who prefer to speak Spanish instead and a dwindling number of older native speakers. This means that often there is a loss of information about the language's correct pronunciation...

Many studies have noted great variability in speech perception ability among postlingually deafened adults with cochlear implants. This study examined phoneme misperceptions for 30 cochlear implant listeners using either the Nucleus-22 or Clarion version 1.2 device to examine whether listeners with better overall speech perception differed qualitatively from poorer listeners in their perception...

The intelligibility of speech having either a single " hole " in various bands or having two " holes " in disjoint or adjacent bands in the spectrum was assessed with normal-hearing listeners. In Experiment 1, the effect of spectral "holes " on vowel and consonant recognition was evaluated using speech processed through six frequency bands, and synthesized as a sum of sinewaves. Results showed ...

In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners ́ responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and...