The perception of speech sounds can be re-tuned through a mechanism of lexically driven perceptual learning after exposure to instances of atypical speech production. This study asked whether this re-tuning is sensitive to the position of the atypical sound within the word. We investigated perceptual learning using English voiced stop consonants, which are commonly devoiced in word-final positi...

An abstract of the thesis of Jennifer Weber for the Master of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences presented June 7, 2007. Title: Voice Onset Time (VOT) Of Voiced and Voiceless Initial Stops and Initial /s/+Stop Consonant Clusters in Monolingual English-speaking Adults and 4-

Production and perception of syllables in a second language (L2) that has relatively complex syllable structure, such as English, is expected to be difficult for native speakers of a language with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. A series of experiments investigated the perception, production, and learning of English syllables by native Japanese speakers. Results showed t...

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [character: see text] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[character: see text]k, [character: see text] t, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization an...

This study investigates whether perceptual learning (e.g. Norris, McQueen & Cutler 2003; Eisner & McQueen 2005; Kraljic & Samuel 2006, 2007; Kraljic, Samuel & Brennan 2008) has crosslinguistic effects in Hindi-English bilinguals. We hypothesized that perceptual learning in bilingual listeners generalizes across languages to similar phonemes in an untrained language. In particular, this study te...

Initiation and maintenance of vibrations of the vocal folds require suitable conditions of adduction, longitudinal tension, and transglottal airflow. Thus manipulation of adduction/abduction, stiffening/slackening, or degree of transglottal flow may, in principle, be used to determine the voicing status of a speech segment. This study explores the control of voicing and voicelessness in speech ...

In parametric text-to-speech synthesis using Hidden Markov Model (HMM), the fundamental frequency (F0) parameter modelling is important because it has a direct effect on the prosody of synthetic speech. F0 is typically modelled by a discrete distribution for unvoiced speech and a continuous distribution for voiced, by using a multi-space distribution (MSD). However, F0 modelling using MSD-HMM i...

Although it has traditionally been described as contrasting ejective, voiceless aspirated, and voiced series of stops, there are no previous instrumental phonetic analyses of stop and affricate realizations in Kwak'wala. This study examines voice onset time in a single native speaker. VOT, the timing between the release of stop consonant closure and the onset of periodic voicing, has proven to ...

In most English accents vowel length is approximately 50% greater before a voiced consonant than before its voiceless cognate (the ‘Voicing Effect’). In Scottish English it is conditioned by the ‘Scottish Vowel Length Rule’. The lengthening environments of this rule overlap with those of the Voicing Effect. The phonetic details of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule and its relationship with the Voi...