OBJECTIVES Voice and speech alterations after total thyroidectomy may be associated with other extralaryngeal factors, such as neck muscle dysfunction and neck scar contracture. We evaluated the acoustic characteristics of oral vowel sounds and changes in hyoid bone movement before and after thyroidectomy. METHODS Twenty-nine female patients undergoing total thyroidectomy were included. Funda...

This experiment determined the relation between discrimination thresholds and thejudgement of vowels as good, confusable, or non-English. A large Fl-by-F2 vowel space encompassing five American English front vowels was synthesized in equal Bark steps. The structure of the vowel space was quite different across listeners except for the vowels /i/ and Gael. Discrimination thresholds were uniform ...

This paper examines the influence of the first language on the accuracy with which trained phoneticians judge isolated monophthongs taken from the phoneme systems of two different languages. The main finding of this study was that the speaker’s as well as listener’s L1 background have a significant influence on judgements which were made by means of the IPA vowel diagram. This paper consists of...

This study investigated whether communication modality affects talkers’ speech adaptation to an interlocutor exposed to background noise. It was predicted that adaptations to lip gestures would be greater and acoustic ones reduced when communicating face-to-face. We video recorded 14 Australian-English talkers (Talker A) speaking in a face-toface or auditory only setting with their interlocutor...

We address methodological issues in calculating the size of the working vowel space area. Although corner vowels are most commonly used in determining its size, we show that this approach may severely underestimate the actual working space. The vowel spaces determined using the large vowels set provided insight into subtle differences between dialects and among age groups. Three approaches were...

This study investigates the acoustic and perceptual consequences of nasal coarticulation in American English. Nasalized (coarticulated) vowels were found to be closer in the F1-F2 acoustic vowel space than corresponding oral (non-coarticulated) vowels, indicating that contrast is reduced in the nasal vowel space, relative to the oral vowel space. With respect to perception, listeners are, perha...

Speech units are reported to be hyperarticulated in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech. Since these two registers have typically been studied separately, it is unclear if the same speech units are hyperarticulated in the same manner between these registers. The aim of the present study is to compare the effect of register on vowel and tone modification in the tonal language Ma...

This study explores the role of different speakers’ L1 vowel compactness on their L2 vowel production efficiency. It is found in study [4] that Spanish speakers who have more compact L1 vowel space can perform better than those “dispersed” speakers in the distinction and production of French vowels, including both the L2 “assimilated” vowel-contrasts, ones similar to the L1 vowel categories, an...

Despite of the the remarks concerning the perceptual formant integration and some other factors, it is assumed that an Fl/F2plot based on Bark-scale, in which the vowel points can be plotted according to a continuous scale, is capable to show in the most cases the psycho-acoustical vowel differences concerning the features front/ back, closejopen, and rounded/ unrounded (with some consideration...

The paper presents a vowel classification model that explicitly predicts vowel identification by second language (L2) learners based on the phonological map of their first language (L1). The model represents vowels in formant space by polar coordinates with the mid-range of the formants as the origin. The model assumes that category boundaries bisect the angles made by two adjacent category cen...