Laughter is often considered a stereotyped and distinctively human signal of positive emotion. Yet, acoustic analyses reveal a great deal of variability in laugh acoustics, and that changes in laughter sounds need not signal comparable changes in emotional state. There is simply not enough evidence to know whether laugh acoustics have specific, well-defined signaling value. However, there is ev...

This study examines the effects of prosodic boundaries, lexical stress, and phrasal accent on the acoustic realization of stops (/t, d/) in Dutch, with special attention paid to language-specificity in the phonetics-prosody interface. The results obtained from various acoustic measures show systematic phonetic variations in the production of /t d/ as a function of prosodic position, which may b...

In recent years, corpus phonetics has become a rapidly expanding field. However, the lack of appropriate tools for automatic acoustic analysis hinders further development of the field. In this paper, we present a methodological study on the automatic extraction of vowel formants using both robust linear predictive coding (RLPC; Lee, 1988) and dynamic formant tracking (Talkin, 1987). Acoustic da...

In this paper we will return to a basic question in phonetics: the relation between acoustic cues and perceived phonetic units. One focus is to study how multiple cues distributed in time unite to form a probable perceptual identity. Using mixed waveforms we evaluate the perceptual impact of acoustical cues in unvoiced stops. The result shows that cues in a vowel preceding a stop can have a sig...

This pilot study presents the results of speech training exercises (phonetic correction) in 5 (4F and 1M) Chinese students of Croatian. The effects of training were assessed through listening evaluation tests and acoustic analysis of vowels. Twenty students of phonetics, native speakers of Croatian evaluated the pronunciation skills of Chinese students. The acoustic analysis of vowel formants i...

Tashlhiyt Berber has contrastive singleton and lexical geminate consonants in all positions. In addition, it has two types of phonologically derived geminates: concatenated and assimilated ones. Within CV phonology, geminates, including post-lexical ones, are represented as single melodic units associated to two prosodic positions. This study examines the way these abstract autosegmental repres...

The hypothesis 'licensing by cue' by Steriade holds that phonological contrasts are maintained in environments that provide better acoustic cues to the contrasts and are neutralized in environments that provide poorer acoustic cues or no cues. This paper tests the hypothesis by examining the distribution of a phonological contrast--the Russian plain/palatalized coronal stops /t/ and /tj/ in var...

Tools for investigating speech signals are an invaluable help to teach phonetics and more generally speech sciences. For several years we have undertaken the development of the software WinSnorri which is a research tool and an illustration tool for both speech scientists and teachers in phonetics. It consists of five types of tools: • to edit speech signals, • to annotate phonetically or ortho...

In the present work, we describe and discuss two studies in field of motivating-speech research. The investigate voice-quality features (study 1) pragmatic aspects 2) German motivating speech, thereby adding to current state-of-the-art understanding speech language 1 . We find indications that a low amount breathiness, more periodic signal balanced distribution specific elements contribute impa...