Frequency lowering is a form of signal processing designed to match speech to the residual auditory capacity of a listener with a high frequency hearing loss. A vocoder-based frequency-lowering system similar to one studied by Lippmann was evaluated in the present study. In this system, speech levels in high frequency bands modulated one-third-octave bands of noise at low frequencies, which wer...

This study presents longitudinal acoustic evidence of how an adult speaker’s vowels change across his lifespan. Noam Chomsky was chosen as a speaker because he presents an excellent opportunity to study the effect of relocation to a different dialect area on adult phonology since he was born and raised in Philadelphia and moved to Boston in 1955. Two linguistic variables that have different pho...

The coordination of velum and oral gestures for English [n] is studied using real-time MRI movies to reconstruct vocal tract aperture functions. This technique allows for the examination of parts of the vocal tract otherwise inaccessible to dynamic imaging or movement tracking. The present experiment considers syllable onset, coda, and juncture geminate nasals and also addresses the effects of ...

The acoustics of nasals are an important source of speakerdiscriminating features. Nasal spectra contain poles and zeros dependent upon nasal cavities which are complex static structures which vary from person to person. Nasal spectra may therefore have low withinspeaker and high between-speaker variability. This study applies a recent pole-zero model estimation technique based on a logarithmic...

This work intends to discuss the distinctive features of laterals in Contemporary European Portuguese, particular [+lateral] and [+continuous], based on language acquisition data. For this purpose, productions 80 typically developing children aged between 3 4 years eleven months were analyzed. The results show that, after nasals, lateral onset position is first sonorant be acquired. If are dist...

The Albanian language is traditionally divided between the Gheg dialect to geographic north and now Standard Tosk south. Recent literature of historically isolated Malsia Madhe (Dedvukaj 2022) has revealed a subdialect which not undergone specific phonological sound changes seen in both Modern dialects. distinct from dialects (Malsia) that it contains homorganic nasal-stop clusters positions wh...

Automatic forced alignment between transcriptions has achieved high levels of agreement for languages with large corpora, but the technique holds great promise for work on all languages. Here, we apply two forced alignment programs to data from an endangered Mixtecan language of Mexico. Both yielded a majority of boundaries within 20 ms of hand-labeled ones. Phonemes with fairly steady-state el...

In this work we present a speaker verification system based on 4 broad phonetic categories: vowels+diphthongs, fricatives, glides+nasals, and silence+stops. Using these categories separately, it is observed that vowels, diphthongs, and fricatives are the most important categories for speaker verification. This observation confirms the results from the analysis of speaker and channel variability...