Recent research has suggested consonants and vowels serve different roles during language processing. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants but not over vowels, simple structural generalizations are easily made over vowels but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the origins of this asymmetry are unknown. Here we tested if a lifelong experience with language is ne...

Normal vowels are known to have irregularities in the pitch-to-pitch variation which is quite important for speech signals to be perceived as natural human sound. Such pitch-to-pitch variation of vowels is studied in the light of nonlinear dynamics. For the analysis, five normal vowels recorded from three male and two female subjects are exploited, where the vowel signals are shown to have norm...

Strong and weak syllables in English can be distinguished on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. Critical for deciding between these factors are syllables containing unstressed unreduced vowels, such as the first syllable of automata. In this study 12 speakers produced sentences containing matched sets of words with initial vowels ranging from stressed to reduced, at norm...

This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were com...

This study investigates how the native speakers of Japanese tell the differences of the words containing the devocalized vowels. The close vowels [K? and =/? devocalize in Japanese when they are situated between voiceless consonants and between pause and voiceless consonant. In this paper, we verify the hypothesis that the devocalized vowels are the voiceless fricatives. =M KÀVVQ? =M /ÀVVQ? =M ...

Danish has a distinctive vowel length opposition which is realized with little differences in vowel qualities. This paper investigates the possibilities of using this fact in reducing the size of the speech unit database in a high quality concatenative based text-to-speech system for Danish. The purpose is to evaluate the concept of using long vowels for synthesizing the corresponding short vow...

Abstract Expressing syllable weight by moras leads to two problems. First, there are languages, such as Wolof, with long vowels and geminates, which both make a bimoraic, but where only vowels, not count heavy for stress. Second, languages in closed syllables light stress, segmental modifications (laryngeal metathesis Cayuga degemination Chugach Alutiiq). It is argued that two-layered mora mode...

In this study, the effects of syllable position, syllable type and vowels on the intensity of disyllabic words in Sundanese are analyzed. It is shown from the result that, in Sundanese, for disyllabic words, the first syllable tends to be stressed, so the intensity values of vowels in the first syllable are larger than that in the second syllable. As the CVC syllable is phonologically heavier t...