Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of vowel duration used in the Bell Labs Japanese TTS system. We describe the constraints on vowel devoicing, and effects of factors such as phone identity, surrounding phone identities, accentuation, syllabic structure, and phrasal position on the duration of bot...

A perception experiment on stop consonant voicing in (C)V1CV2 was conducted to test the effects of the preceding vowel. Five types of /ki/ as CV1 differing in closure voicing, vowel duration and vowel devoicing were spliced with a da-ta VOT continuum as CV2. Subjects’ judgment between the spliced kita and kida along a VOT range was compared with that of ta and da in isolation. Strong effects of...

This paper discusses two well-known phonetic-phonological phenomena of Japanese, vowel devoicing and mora-timed rhythm. Regarding vowel devoicing as a process of vowels getting consonantal, it may change the mora-templated syllable structures of Japanese, resulting in the deviation from mora-timed rhythm. To investigate spontaneous Japanese with comparison to other languages, the label data of ...

Vowel devoicing is a phenomenon that is reported to occur in many languages such as Japanese, Parisian and Montreal French, Turkish and English. This paper investigates vowel devoicing in Korean. A devoiced vowel does not exhibit characteristic vocal tract resonances, and instead is realized as a long interval of aspiration or frication following consonant release, resulting in non-distinct seg...

A distinction in vowel quantity is typically realized acoustically by vowel duration. Research on the perception of Swedish vowel quantity supports this and further suggests that when the duration of a vowel is relatively long (due, e.g., to inherent duration), vowel quantity may not be adequately cued by duration alone and may also make use of the vowel spectra to distinguish vowel quantities....

In this study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the specificity of adaptation to real-time formant shifting. During the experiments, talkers were adapted to altered auditory feedback for one vowel (trained vowel) and received unaltered feedback for a different vowel (untrained vowel). In the first experiment, production of the untrained vowel was measured while the talker was in th...

This study presents an overview of the different strategies that Persian learners of English employ to deal with initial clusters. While vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to Persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. In this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. The first o...

Current understanding of disability and impairment has led to new approaches in Rehabilitation. In this issue of Iranian Rehabilitation Journal, a variety of articles introduces a new trend in rehabilitation. "Emotion pitch" of each vowel sound and Percentage of vowel correct is the subject which Talie Zarifian and her colleagues discussed in their article. Persian speaking children can get ben...