PURPOSE Temporal order abilities decrease with age. Declining temporal processing abilities may influence the identification of rapid vowel sequences. Identification patterns for asynchronous vowel pairs were explored across the life span. METHOD Young, middle-aged, and older listeners completed temporal order tasks for pairs of 70-ms and 40-ms vowel stimuli. For a given vowel duration, natur...

Vowel duration and local fundamental frequency changes are investigated as acoustical cues to vowel quantity identification by Japanese listeners. To examine the role of these factors, a perception experiment was carried out. The results indicate that, even though vowel duration serves as a dominant perceptual cue, when vowel quantity cannot be adequately cued by vowel duration alone, the F0 in...

introduction: on the importance of the formant frequency, it is enough to say that the first three formants of a vowel and their internal relationships are the major components in detection of vowel type by listener. moreover, the quality of a vowel depends on its factorial frequencies. the main application of measuring factorial frequency is for description of vowel errors because recognizing ...

This study aims to quantify the relative contributions of phonetic categories and acoustic detail on phonotactically induced perceptual vowel epenthesis in Japanese listeners. A vowel identification task tested whether a vowel was perceived within illegal consonant clusters and, if so, which vowel was heard. Cross-spliced stimuli were used in which vowel coarticulation present in the cluster di...

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on preceding vowel is important signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The vowel-consonant monosyllabic words Cantonese represents a testing case for ...

Cross-linguistically, vowel length contrasts may involve changes in vowel quality. In a different but more gradient way, speech style influences vowel articulation. While both alter vowel acoustics, it remains unclear whether both are byproducts of general processes of vowel undershoot or reflect a modification of articulatory gestures independent of durational constraints. This study investiga...

The vowel space reflects the right-angled shape of the vocal tract, and many consonants exploit the palatal wall. These two facts suggest the importance of the geometry of peripheral structure in speech production. In this study, the relationship between geometry and articulatory variation was examined using a database of English and Japanese speakers. The geometry of each speaker's vocal tract...

The classification of unvoiced stops in consonant–vowel (CV) syllables, segmented from continuous speech, is investigated by features related to speech production. As burst and vocalic transitions contribute to identification of stops in the CV context, features are computed from both regions. Although formants are the truly discriminating articulatory features, their estimation from the speech...

In Japanese, there is frequent alternation between CV morae and moraic geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzed the phonemic environments of consonant gemination (CG) using the “Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ).” The results revealed that the environment in which gemination occurs is, to some extent, parallel to that of vowel devoicing. However, there are two crucial differences. One...