In this study, we determine the acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Tongan. Vowels with primary stress show differences in F0, intensity, duration, F1, and voice quality, but F0 is the best predictor of primary stress. Vowels with secondary stress are mainly cued by a difference in F0. With regards to the effects of stress on the vowel space, we find that all five Tongan vowe...

Spanish does not allow vowel deletion in unstressed syllables the way languages like English do. However, it may occur in contexts of VV-sequences across word boundaries, under durational reduction in connected speech. This paper explores the effects of vowel deletion on the perception of [-high] vowel sequences on 8 native speakers of Peninsular Spanish. The results are then compared to the sp...

Many Sinitic languages respect low vowel raising (LVR) whereby the low vowel /a/ is raised to /e/ only when flanked by a palatal glide and a coronal coda. In this article, I show that LVR in Sinitic languages is a genuine process of grammar because low-level phonetic coarticulatory effects alone cannot account for crosslinguistic/dialectal variation. Specifically, my survey reveals that vowel d...

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to th...

In this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of Russian loanword adaptation in Persian, on the view of Optimal Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993, 2003). It is the first study of phonological process on Russian loanwords adaptation in Persian. By gathering about 50 current Russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. We found out that vowel insertion, vowel prothesis...

A 2D biomechanical model of the tongue is used to simulate movement sequences and speech signals in Vowel-to-Vowel transitions. The analysis is focused on how central commands and biomechanics can interact and influence the physical speech signals. In particular, it is shown how complex velocity profiles can be explained by the biomechanics, and how the low-pass filtering effect of the biomecha...

The articulatory range of a speaker has previously been estimated by the shape formed by first and second formant measurements of produced vowels. In a majority of the currently available metrics, formant frequency measurements are reduced to a single estimate for a condition, which has adverse consequences for subsequent statistical testing. Other metrics provide estimates of size of vowel art...

this article addresses the perceptual correlates of compensatory lengthening in persian. in a perception experiment, duration, spectral tilt measurements h1-h2 and h1-f1 and f0 were varied in several steps based on the results from a production experiment (sadeghi, 2007). subjects were asked to identify the tokens involving vowel length. results revealed that duration is the most reliable perce...