This paper addresses the validity of the segmental anchoring hypothesis for tonal landmarks (henceforth, SAH) as described in recent work by (among others) Ladd, Faulkner, D., Faulkner, H., & Schepman [1999. Constant ‘segmental’ anchoring of f0 movements under changes in speech rate. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 1543–1554], Ladd [2003. Phonological conditioning of f0 targe...

Referential utterances are by their nature ambiguous to novice language learners. Each utterance consists of multiple layers of information that must be decoded: 1) the linguistic structure (how the sounds and words should be packaged into meaningful units), 2) the world structure (how people, objects and actions in the world relate to one another and which is the current focus of attention) an...

Amharic is the Semitic language that has the second large number of speakers after Arabic (Hayward and Richard 1999). Its writing system is syllabic with Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllable structure. Amharic orthography has more or less a one to one correspondence with syllabic sounds. We have used this feature of Amharic to develop a CV syllable-based speech recognizer, using Hidden Markov Modeling...

Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lex...

Building and developing linguistic resources for languages is of prime importance with many areas of application. This paper focusses on a fully automatic approach to the aquisition of a syllable phonotactics for a particular language. In this approach the phonotactic constraints for a language are encoded in a finite-state phonotactic automaton the structure of which can be automatically deriv...

Acoustic analyses of sentence utterances noted slowed speech tempo, concomitant with a tendency towards syllable isochrony, in patients with impaired vocal tract control due to ataxic disorders. Furthermore, kinematic measurements revealed decreased maximum velocity of articulatory orofacial gestures with respect to a given movement amplitude. Syllable lengthening seems to develop into a platea...