We applied a physical model of the human vocal tract, which was originally designed for simulating English /r/, and tested whether the model can produce a certain range of vowels, especially mid front vowels. We first confirmed that the model can produce such vowels with high intelligibility. By changing the tongue height of the model, learners can adjust the vowel quality by listening to the o...

In previous work [1] we investigated the vowel structures of Japanese in both articulatory space and auditory perceptual space using Laplacian eigenmaps, and examined relations between speech production and perception. The results showed that the inherent structures of Japanese vowels were consistent in the two spaces. To verify whether such a property generalizes to other languages, we use the...

An auditory analysis of a speech data base in French highlighted the use of rhythmic patterns by speakers. The rhythmic patterns are built by employing successive prosodic groups of the same length expressed in a number of syllables. These rhythmic patterns were not present to the same extent in the elocution of every speaker, but were speaker dependent. Although the auditory detection of the p...

Purpose: To assess the auditory perceptual performance of children in a task of identification of vowel contrasts, to classify which phonemes and vowel contrasts provide higher or lower degrees of difficulty, and to verify the influence of age in this performance. Methods: Data recordings of auditory perceptual performance of 66 children in a task of identification using the software Perception...

In this study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the specificity of adaptation to real-time formant shifting. During the experiments, talkers were adapted to altered auditory feedback for one vowel (trained vowel) and received unaltered feedback for a different vowel (untrained vowel). In the first experiment, production of the untrained vowel was measured while the talker was in th...

Our ability to discriminate sounds such as vowels is not uniform throughout acoustic space. That is, our auditory perceptual spaces are warped representations of acoustic space. One example of auditory space warping, the perceptual magnet effect, arises from exposure to the phonemes of an infant’s native language. We have developed a neural model that accounts for this effect. The model is base...

Our ability to discriminate sounds such as vowels is not uniform throughout acoustic space. That is, our auditory perceptual spaces are warped representations of acoustic space. One example of auditory space warping, the perceptual magnet effect, arises from exposure to the phonemes of an infant’s native language. We have developed a neural model that accounts for this effect. The model is base...

Auditory feedback in the headphones of talkers was manipulated in the F1 dimension using a real-time vowel formant filtering system. Minimum formant shifts required to elicit a response and the amount of compensation were measured for vowels across the English vowel space. The largest response in production of F1 was observed for the vowel /ε/ and smaller or non-significant changes were found f...

A series of experiments was conducted to determine (1) the accuracy with which vowel segment durations in spoken sentences can be represented in auditory sensory storage and (2) the extent to which phoneme boundaries in the identification of phonemic vowel length in Dutch are affected by syntactic and/or auditory-phonetic context. In a preliminary production test it was found that durations of ...