Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first 9 is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means 10 ‘frame’ and [katta] with a long [tt] means ‘bought’. This sort of contrast is usually limited 11 to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse 12 languages. The other...

This study was designed to identify English speech contrasts that might be appropriate for the computer-based auditory-visual training of Spanish learners of English. It examines auditory-visual and auditory consonant and vowel confusions by Spanish speaking students of English and a native English control group. 36 Spanish listeners were tested on their identification of 16 consonants and 9 vo...

The paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of final lengthening in Russian. The Corpus of Russian Professionally Read Speech (CORPRES) was used to investigate the degree of word and vowel lengthening as a function of prosodic factors, including prosodic boundary type and phrase or utterance pitch pattern. The results show that the degree of both word and vowel lengthening depends on...

This paper examines the status of language-specific systematic detail in the realisation of phonology and proposes the formalisation of this detail as a set of phonetic motifs. It is argued that such motifs form a key component of phonological (linguistic) knowledge and may shape the language-specific emergence of phonological structure, as illustrated by a case study of consonant gemination. I...

in this article, the low back vowel /a/ in word-final positions in eghlidian dialect, one of persian dialects, is studied. this vowel is represented phonetically as [a], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. since one of the authors of th...

the third person singular enclitic verb /-ast/ which is equivalent to english verb “is” undergoes the highest number of  phonological processes among persian enclitic forms of the verb “boudan” (to be); it changes to [as] in one environment, to [s] in another, and to [e] in four environments. deletion of /t/ is common in all six contexts. these different pronunciations are determined by various...

The purpose of this paper is to test whether the Simple Syllable Structure (SSS) proposed by Duanmu (1990:[2]) is true of English onsets or not. If the SSS holds for English onset, English onglides should be secondary articulations on the onset consonant rather than separate sounds. We will test this by measuring the duration of the initial consonant –glide combination, to determine whether it ...

An EPG (electro-palatographic) corpus of Iwaidja consonant sequences was examined to investigate global consonant timing patterns and the extent of coarticulation and coproduction in nasal+stop and lateral+stop clusters. As observed in other Australian languages (e.g. Warlpiri), there was limited anticipatory coarticulation in certain heterorganic sequences and evidence of coarticulatory resist...

Differences in gain (enhancement, in dB) required to optimize the consonant/vowel intensity ratio in nonsense syllables were determined for stops and fricatives, both voiced and voiceless, in 12 children with congenital moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss. The test stimuli were vowel/consonant nonsense syllables with various levels of enhancement ranging from 0 dB (for the unprocessed...