In Moroccan Arabic it is widely accepted that short vowels are mostly elided, resulting in consonant clusters and consonant geminates. In this paper we present evidence from our exploratory timing study that challenges this widely accepted principle. We work with minimal pairs of singleton consonants vs. geminates (e.g. /bka/ vs. /b kka/) that reveals a presence of a vowel insertion between the...

Sensorineural loss is characterized by increased hearing threshold, reduction in the dynamic range of hearing and loudness recruitment, and increased temporal and spectral masking, resulting in degraded speech perception. Several techniques including spectral contrast enhancement, multi-band frequency compression, and dichotic binaural presentation have been investigated for reducing the advers...

We discuss post-processing of speech that has been recorded during Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the vocal tract area. These speech recordings are contaminated by high levels of acoustic noise from the MRI scanner. Also, the frequency response of the sound signal path is not flat as a result of restrictions on recording instrumentation and arrangements due to MRI technology. The post-proc...

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of English vowels. Two groups of Persian EFL learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of American English. Vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. Ladefoged and Maddison’s (1996) F1 F2 measurements for American English v...

This study tested the hypothesis that object-based attention modulates the discrimination of level increments in stop-consonant noise bursts. With consonant-vowel-consonant (CvC) words consisting of an ≈80-dB vowel (v), a pre-vocalic (Cv) and a post-vocalic (vC) stop-consonant noise burst (≈60-dB SPL), we measured discrimination thresholds (LDTs) for level increments (ΔL) in the noise bursts pr...