This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced Iranian ESL learners. A total of 36 adult Iranian ESL learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at Memorial University (MUN) were recruited for the study. Advanced participants had the experience of living in Canada for at least three years while beginners...

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabi...

The concept of vowel grade by which morphological features in some IndoEuropean languages are signaled by change in the quality of the vowel of a given form has long been recognized. More recently, the term has also been applied to the variation in vowels that occur in some case-marking prepositional forms in Austronesian languages. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate some of the proces...

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, ...

A perception experiment based on systematic variation of disyllabic vowel duration and vowel quality, and of intervocalic fricative duration in the German minimal lexical stress pair 'Kaffee “coffee” vs. Ca'fé (locality) in a low f0 tail or a high f0 plateau shows highly significant effects of the 3 variables as cues to lexical stress. The combined vowel quality and fricative variables outweigh...

Three experiments used word-spotting to examine influences of phonetic and musical parameters on intelligibility of closed-set but unpredictable words in polytextual singing. Main comparisons were: 3 musical genres (medieval polyphonic motet, similar but homophonic motet, jingle); harmony (consonant, dissonant); keyword phonetic properties (‘acoustic contrast’, vowel length, vowel quality); con...

The Hungarian vowel system is traditionally regarded as quantity-based. In such languages, length is primarily realised as a durational difference with little or no distinction in vowel quality. In this paper, we argue that the various types of interrelationship between quantity and quality have an impact on the target configuration of short and long vowels, and that quantity distinction is not...

The aim of this experiment is to assess the effects of the linguistic status of timbre on pitch processing in the brainstem. Brainstem frequency following responses were evoked by the Mandarin high-rising lexical tone superimposed on a native vowel quality ([i]), nonnative vowel quality ([œ]), and iterated rippled noise (nonspeech). Results revealed that voice fundamental frequency magnitudes w...

Clear speech is characterised by longer segmental durations and less target undershoot [9] which results in more extreme spectral features. This paper deals with the clarity of vowels produced in spontaneous speech in a large corpus of task-oriented dialogues. We present an automatic technique for measuring vowel clarity on the basis of a vowel’s spectral characteristics. This technique was eva...