This study examined the production of four-word tongue twisters (e.g. top cap cop tab) by six English participants using ultrasound imaging of the tongue. Onset consonant closures for /t, d, k, ɡ/ in the contexts of /a/ and /æ/ were extracted from the video and traced using EdgeTrak software. Traces were analyzed using a mean minimum point-to-point distance measure between curves [12]. Curves w...

Allophonic height alternations in MOUTH and PRICE, conditioned by coda voicing, have been confirmed for a wide variety of English accents, especially in the North American context. Realisations may vary in degree but not in direction. Moreton and Thomas [1] suggest that universal processes may underly the varying productions and propose the Asymmetric Assimilation model to unify observations on...

The speech quality of a unit selection speech synthesizer depends highly on the database. This paper describes an approach for sentence selection for Finnish speech database recordings aiming at optimal coverage. The main idea is to define the diphone in a slightly different way: to distinguish diphones consisting of different allophones and also different linguistic positions, i.e. intraand in...

An important question in the L2 acquisition of phonemic distinctions is whether learners have to perceive contrasts before they can successfully produce them. In this paper, data on both the perception and production of the English /s/-/š/ contrast were elicited from native speakers of Korean, a language in which [s] and [š] are allophones of the same phoneme. General principles of phonology pr...

This paper presents a novel method for synthesizing speech signal using a phone-based concatenation approach. Neural network is employed for the generalization of the phone templates during synthesis. Simpli ed articulatory space input parameters based on a modi ed vowel diagram are used to provide exible and e ective articulatory control. It also enables the design of an articulatory control m...

In this paper, we are looking into the adaptation issues of vocabulary-independent (VI) systems. Just as with speakeradaptation in speaker-independent system, two vocabulary adaptation algorithms [5] are implemented in order to tailor the VI subword models to the target vocabulary. The first algorithm is to generate vocabulary-adapted clustering decision trees by focusing on relevant allophones...

Models of the acquisition of word segmentation are typically evaluated using phonemically transcribed corpora. Accordingly, they implicitly assume that children know how to undo phonetic variation when they learn to extract words from speech. Moreover, whereas models of language acquisition should perform similarly across languages, evaluation is often limited to English samples. Using child-di...

English a-tensing has received numerous treatments in the phonological and sociolinguistic literature, but the question of why it occurs (i) at all and (ii) in seemingly unnatural disjunctive phonological environments has not been settled. This paper presents a novel phonetic enhancement account of a-tensing in Philadelphia, New York City and Belfast English. I propose that a-tensing is best un...

In (Modern) Greek, velar consonants become palatalized before front vowels following an allophonic rule. In many southern dialects, the variants that result from palatalization further undergo softening in this same position. While velar softening is well-documented in Greek dialectology studies, most previous work is based on impressionistic data. In the present study, several acoustic and psy...