The relationship between the %V, ΔC, and ΔV metrics of rhythm and the phonological characteristics they are generally believed to relate to is directly investigated. A cross-linguistically diverse sample of languages is examined to determine whether languages which pattern similarly according to phonological features, including range of allowable syllable structure, presence of phonemic vowel l...

One of the problems in speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition is how to cope with the great variability in the realizations of vowel phonemes. In speech synthesis we do not know how to introduce this variability in a systematic way in order to increase intelligibility and naturalness, whereas in automatic speech recognition it causes a great deal of labeling problems. Part of this va...

This study deals with listeners' ability to identify linguistic units from linguistically incomplete stimuli and relates this to the potentiality of vowel reduction in a word. Synthetic speech was used to produce stimuli that were similar to real words, but where the vowel in the pre-stress syllable was excluded. Listeners then performed a lexical decision test, where they had to decide whether...

Word frequency, phonological neighborhood density, semantic predictability in context, and discourse mention have all been previously found to cause reduction of vowels. Other researchers have suggested that reduction based on these factors is reflective of a unified process in which “redundant” or “predictable” elements are reduced, and that this reduction is largely mediated by prosody. Using...

In " Approaches to Phonological Complexity ". 1. Abstract Vowels can be produced with static articulatory configurations represented by dots in acoustic space (generally by formant frequencies in the F1-F2 plane). But because vowel characteristics vary with speaker, consonantal environment (co-articulation) and production rate (reduction phenomenon), vowel formant frequencies can also be repres...

Eight languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish) with 6 differently sized vowel inventories were analysed in terms of vowel formants. A tendency to phonetic reduction for vowels of short acoustic durations clearly emerges for all languages. The data did not provide evidence for an effect of inventory size on the global acoustic space and only the...

There is a debate in the literature on whether the intelligibility of English second language (L2) speech is more affected, among other things, by incorrect vowel reduction or by incorrect word stress placement. Identifying which features interfere most with intelligibility will assist in selecting what to prioritize in teaching pronunciation. The focus of ...

In natural speech, a lot of interand intra-subject variation in the realisation of vowels is found. Perception experiments show that listeners can discriminate speaker-independent levels of vowel reduction. The question is whether all speakers used the same acoustic cues for signalling reduction levels. The acoustic realisation of reduction levels of the vowels [u:], [i:], and [a:] of three spe...

Suppose you are having dinner and you want the salt. There are various ways of asking your dish companions for the salt, but the shortest one is calling for "Salt!". Apparently, such a request, that will normally be expressed in several words, can also be said in one single word (if we disregard the aspect of decency). Other examples of condensed messages are telegrams, the speech of young chil...