This paper is an acoustic phonetic description of vowels in Hetang Cantonese, and focuses on the diphthongization of nuclear vowels. Different to the representative dialect such as Guangzhou or Hong Kong Cantonese, the Hetang dialect exhibits its unique characteristics regarding the phonetics and phonology of vowels. A noticeable phenomenon is the diphthongization of nuclear vowesl. And, a tetr...

Exploiting the information about the vocal tract shape that produced the speech has been appealing to speech researchers and scientists for a long period of time. Experimental studies that included the articulatory information from physiological measurements supported the idea that this information could be useful in a number of areas of speech science and technology. However, the estimation of...

A speech database for Welsh was recorded in a studio from read text by a few speakers. The purpose is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of Welsh speech sounds and prosody. It can also serve as a resource for future work in speech synthesis and recognition. The speech is labelled by hand at the acoustic phonetic level, and labelled semi-automatically at the phoneme, syllable, and word ...

Evaluating spoken grammar skills is an important component of evaluating the overall spoken English skills of a candidate. This paper presents a novel approach that incorporates the knowledge of acoustic-phonetics to improve the performance of an existing spoken grammar evaluation technique in a questionanswer paradigm. A novel acoustic parameter, Onset Coherence, to make a one-pass distinction...

0. Introduction Human language only uses a subset of sounds that are physiologically possible. Within this subset there is a core of widely recurring sounds. The structure and frequency of these speech sounds is extensively described in UPSID – the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (Maddieson 1984), a landmark publication in comparative phonology and point of departure for PRUPSID , ...

Approaches to characterizing and explaining the diverse phonologies of the world’s languages usually begin with data from the analysis of speech signals or from the results of speech production and perception experiments. In the present paper, the dynamic acoustic properties that arise from changing the shape of a simple acoustic tube 18cm length (without any articulatory machinery) are explore...

The usual approach to automatic continuous speech recognition is what can be called the acoustic-phonetic modelling approach. In this approach, voice is considered to hold two different kinds of information—acoustic and phonetic—. Acoustic information is represented by some kind of feature extraction out of the voice signal, and phonetic information is extracted from the vocabulary of the task ...

Forensic speaker identification is one of the most important tasks dealt with in forensic phonetics. The usage of acoustic evidence increases and at the same time grows the necessity for easy-toapply and reliable methods. The method should be consistent and straight and should enable an expert to make identification decision with clearly determined probability. This paper is to outline the rout...

This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issues of the phonetics-phonology and semanticspragmatics of intonation. The target data are tokens of fixed word strings like “than I did”, where intonation varies in a way which correlates with grammatical and pragmatic context. In a web harvest procedure, audio files were identified using a search eng...

C. G. Kratzenstein (1723-1795) is known in phonetics as the first to publish details of his attempt to synthesize speech – in his case, the “five” (sic) vowels a, e, i, o, u. He was, however, “a man of many parts”, making contributions in such fields medicine, exploration, navigation, and physics, among others. Although when his principal phonetic work, was published in 1781 and 1782 there was ...