In this paper, mimicry speech is analysed using features at suprasegmental, segmental and subsegmental levels. The possibility of the imitator getting close at each of these levels is examined here. The imitator cannot duplicate all features of the target, as imitation depends on the target speaker, utterance chosen, and his ability to imitate. To study the variation of features in the case of ...

This study investigates the notion of perceptual distance among the Afro-Asiatic family. It is based on a “same/different” task involving French subjects and items from 10 languages or dialects (8 Afro-Asiatic: Amharic, Moroccan Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Tarifit Berber, Touareg Berber, Hausa, Hebrew, Somali and 2 intruders: Armenian and Turkish). The task was judged very difficult by the subjec...

The notion of phonetic convergence covers all adaptations in articulatory and acoustic features towards those of a communicative partner, or in other terms an increase in segmental and suprasegmental similarity between them (Pardo 2006). Up until now most of the experiments on convergence were designed for monolingual dyads, with very few investigations of convergence in native-nonnative intera...

The paper concerns universal and language-specific aspects of emotion perception in children's speech. Three experiments were carried out to investigate differences and similarities in the assessment of emotions by German and Russian adult listeners. The corpora of German and Russian emotional children's speech were employed in the first and second experiments. In the third experiment German an...

The Estonian three-way quantity system is usually described by a robust foot-level compensatory mechanism of the stressed and the unstressed syllable durations. Beneath the three-way foot-level contrast, the quantity oppositions can be realized by seven different segmental combinations of the initial vowel and the following intervocalic consonant length. In this work we investigated the effects...

Processing dependencies in speech have traditionally been studied using a speeded classification paradigm. In this procedure, listeners have to monitor one dimension of speech (e.g. segmental detail) while another dimension (e.g. suprasegmental detail) varies. Variation in the unattended dimension has been shown to interfere with responses to the attended dimension. In the present study, the sp...

This position paper highlights the importance of suprasegmental training in secondary language (L2) acquisition. Suprasegmental features are manifested in terms of acoustic cues and convey important information about linguistic and information structures. Hence, L2 learners must harness appropriate suprasegmental productions for effective communication. However, this learning process is influen...

This is an attempt to show structured heterogeneity of English stress variants by applying a Labovian quantitative study to suprasegmental variation. Compared with the relatively frequent occurrence of segmental variation such as [Hŋ] ~[Hm\ hm ,hmf+ the low frequency of suprasegmental variation makes it difficult to observe differences of pronunciation in different styles. A detailed analysis o...

Previous studies have demonstrated that motor control of segmental features of speech rely to some extent on sensory feedback. Control of voice fundamental frequency (F0) has been shown to be modulated by perturbations in voice pitch feedback during various phonatory tasks and in Mandarin speech. The present study was designed to determine if voice Fo is modulated in a task-dependent manner dur...