The present study investigated how the vowel system of the first language (Cantonese) affects the acquisition of vowels of a second language. Forty native Cantonese-speaking adults (20 males and 20 females), with ages between 19 years 4 months and 26 years 10 months were recruited. Data from the first and second formant frequencies indicated that, for both female and male speakers, production o...

The morphology of the pronominal suffixes in dialectal Arabic are particular interest for scholars history two main reasons. First, multiple dialects attest that, from a comparative perspective, apparently retain final short vowels. second and more complicated issue concerns vowels which precede dialects, thought to either have been case inflecting or epenthetic. In this paper, I take up Jean C...

Eight experiments tested the hypothesis that infants' word segmentation abilities are reducible to familiar sound-pattern parsing regardless of actual word boundaries. This hypothesis was disconfirmed in experiments using the headturn preference procedure: 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word (e.g., dice) from passages containing the corresponding phonemic p...

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words, by testing children's sensitivity to 1-...

The performance of speech recognisers in combat aircraft is degraded seriously by the extreme physical stresses to which the crew are subjected. This paper describes measurements of first and second formant frequencies of nine vowels from one speaker recorded under high levels of acceleration, with and without positive pressure breathing. Under acceleration alone, F2 is reduced for high front v...

Certain of the complex spectral effects of vowel nasalization bear a resemblance to the effects of modifying the tongue or jaw position with which the vowel is produced. Perceptual evidence suggests that listener misperceptions of nasal vowel height arise as a result of this resemblance. Whereas previous studies examined isolated nasal vowels, this research focused on the role of phonetic conte...

This study investigated the effects of age on listeners' tendency to group speech tokens into one or two auditory streams. Younger and older adults were presented with sequences of four vowel sounds, which were arranged according to the proximity of first-formant frequencies between adjacent vowels. In Experiment 1, participants were less accurate in identifying the order of the four vowels and...

In our study we taught a female African Grey 11 Italian words: vowel-like sounds were extracted from comprehensible words after critical listening, and pitch frequency (Pkf) was measured for the first three formants of each vowel. Similarly, formants from human vowels were isolated and measured. The analysis run on formant frequencies mean values of both samples revealed that human vowels could...

This study examined the effect of interruption parameters (e.g., interruption rate, on-duration and proportion), linguistic factors, and other general factors, on the recognition of interrupted consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words in quiet. Sixty-two young adults with normal-hearing were randomly assigned to one of three test groups, "male65," "female65" and "male85," that differed in talker (...