this paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of english vowels. two groups of persian efl learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of american english. vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. ladefoged and maddison’s (1996) f1 f2 measurements for american english v...

Twelve Dutch vowels, each pronounced by 50 male speakers, were analyzed in 18 filter bands comparable in bandwidth with the cat's critical band. By considering the sound levels (in decibels) in these filter bands as dimensions, with a principal-component analysis the 18 dimensions per sound were reduced to four factors which together explain 75% of the total variance. The configuration of the a...

Intra-gestural and inter-gestural coordination in German word-initial consonant clusters /kl, kn, ks, pl, ps/ is investigated in four speakers by means of EMA as a function of segmental make-up and prosodic variation, i.e. prosodic boundary strength and lexical stress. Segmental make-up is shown to determine the extent of articulatory overlap of the clusters, with /kl/ exhibiting the highest de...

In Tokyo Japanese, vowel devoicing is a common process, that leads to the reduction of high, unstressed vowels ( and ) between unvoiced consonants. This article investigates to what extent native Japanese speakers (L1) learning German as foreign language (L2) show a strong tendency to produce these vowels in the foreign language as devoiced, too. Furthermore, the question is addressed whe...

Introduction: Aging reduces the ability to understand speech in noise. Hearing rehabilitation is one of the ways to help older people communicate effectively. This study aimed to investigate the effect of vowel auditory training on the improvement of speech-in-noise (SIN) perception among elderly listeners.   Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 36 elderly ...

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

Investigation of spontaneous speech corpora has shown that vowel devoicing in Japanese is a statistical phenomena. However, factors behind vowel devoicing have not been fully studied. In addition, there have been no studies that specifically examined pre-pausal vowel devoicing. In this paper, we investigate vowel devoicing in the pre-pausal position, in particular, vowel devoicing occurring at ...

Six paralinguistic information types uttered by three subjects were examined. Considerable changes were observed in duration, pitch, vowel formant, and voice quality. These findings require some reconsideration of the problems in the phrase phonology of Japanese like mora-based timing and phrase-initial pitch movement. On the other hand, lexically specified phonological features were more robus...

The aim of the study was to investigate gender-dependent differences in the realization of German glottalized vowel onsets. Laryngographic data of semi-spontaneous speech were collected from four male and four female speakers of Standard German. Measurements of relative vocal fold contact duration were carried out including glottalized vowel onsets as well as non-glottalized controls. The resul...