This study addresses disagreement between previous studies about the hypothesis that phonetic imitation does not occur if it would threaten a phonological contrast. Using a within-subject pretest-shadowingposttest design, we tested imitability of reduction and extension of prevoicing and vowel duration in Czech, a vowel-quantity language with prevoicedvs-unaspirated stop contrasts. Results show...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between compensatory shortening and coarticulation in German tense and lax vowels and to determine whether this relationship was influenced by prosodic accentuation. While previous studies focussed on temporal vowel reduction due to compensatory shortening, and often found conflicting results, our study extends previous results by includ...

This study explored the interaction between semantic predictability and regional dialect variation in an analysis of speech produced by college-aged female talkers from the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects of American English. Previous research on the effects of semantic predictability has shown that vowels in high semantic predictability contexts are temporally and spectrally reduced c...

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...

Three eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners recognized reduced Dutch words better after having heard the same reduced words, or different reduced words of the same reduction type and whether familiarization with one reduction type helps listeners to deal with another reduction type. In the exposure phase, a segmental reduction group was exposed to /b/-reductions (e.g., minder...

Having a foreign accent is unavoidable for late second or language learners. The reason that physical changes in the brain influence learning variety of aspects new system (Flege, 1987; Patkowski, 1990). In other words, well-established first mediates acquisition language. mediation can be called cross-linguistics negative transfer (Sharwood Smith and Kellerma, 1986). terms suprasegmental pronu...

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction pat...

This study examined spectral properties of the Hungarian vowel pair /i/ vs. /i:/ with contrasting phonemic vowel lengths in 2;0 and 4;0 years old boys acquiring Hungarian as their native language. Results were obtained by an automated pitchsynchronous bandfilter analysis method that estimates the spectral envelope representation of vowels. Subsequent data reduction was achieved via principal co...

Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during t...