Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...

In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties (including standard Danish) was assessed among young Danes from Copenhagen. In addition, distances between standard Danish and each of the 17 varieties were measured at the lexical level and at different phonetic levels. In order to determine how well these linguistic levels can predict intelligibility, we c...

Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

An experiment was carried out to examine the possibility of word-final F0 rise without lengthening in French. The results show that, although a variability is observed depending on speaker, syllable structure and syllable number, the final rise can be unaccompanied by vowel lengthening in the phrasemedian final syllable of a noun, in difference to the phrasefinal syllable which is lengthened to...

In this study we investigate whether non-native speakers using a speech recognition system would benefit from phone models of their own native language. For Dutch as the target recognition language, we found that American speakers do not in general benefit from American English models when speaking Dutch. However, using a CVC test methodology, we can conclude that for a certain level of profici...

Recent studies suggest that consonants and vowels are represented separately in cognitive/neural space. Much of the evidence comes from research on dysgraphia (for review, see Miceli & Capasso, submitted). In the first place, letter substitution errors preserve the consonant/vowel (CV) status of the target (e.g., cinema fi cirema or cinoma, but not cintma). Second, there are reports of selectiv...

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...

In Japanese, high vowels may devoice between two unvoiced obstruents (k[u̥]kaku 'division', k[i̥]kaku 'plan'). Recent studies have shown that the devoicing of non-high vowels (k[ḁ]karu 'take', k[e̥]ta 'digit, k[o̥]tae 'answer') may also occur. This paper evaluates the role of vowel duration and vocal folds gestures involved in vowel devoicing in Japanese. An experiment using an electroglottograph (...

Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of segmental 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...

This study extends a cross-linguistic collaboration on phonological development, which aims to compare production of word-initial obstruents across sets of languages which have comparable consonants that differ in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on ...