This study examined the role of automatic selective perceptual processes in native and non-native listeners' perception of a Japanese vowel length contrast (tado vs. taado), using multiple, natural-speech tokens of each category as stimuli in a "categorial oddball" design. Mismatch negativity (MMN) was used to index discrimination of the temporally-cued vowel contrast by naïve adult American li...

It is commonly assumed that, in the cochlea and the brainstem, the auditory system processes speech sounds without differentiating them from any other sounds. At some stage, however, it must treat speech sounds and nonspeech sounds differently, since we perceive them as different. The purpose of this study was to delimit the first location in the auditory pathway that makes this distinction usi...

Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced v...

We used magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measurements to study how speech sounds presented in a realistic spatial sound environment are processed in human cortex. A spatial sound environment was created by utilizing head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), and using a vowel, a pseudo-vowel, and a wide-band noise burst as stimuli. The behaviour of the most prominent auditory response, the corticall...

In this paper, we tried to develop a vowel training assistant method using vowel formant statistics. Formant statistics were obtained from PBW set consists of 452 words from 8 persons. Then, we calculated distance from input formants to each center of vowel formant space. Based on the distance, directions to correct the speaker's manner of articulations, i.e. position of jaw and tongue.

Distributional vowel training for adults has been reported as “effective” for Spanish and Bulgarian learners of Dutch vowels, in studies using a behavioural task. A recent study did not yield a similar clear learning effect for Dutch learners of the English vowel contrast /æ/~/ε/, as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs). The present study aimed to examine the possibility that the latte...

Neural processes underlying identification of durational contrasts were studied by comparing English and Japanese speakers for Japanese short/long vowel identification relative to consonant identification. Enhanced activities for non-native contrast (Japanese short/long vowel identification by English speakers) were observed in brain regions involved with articulatory-auditory mapping (Broca's ...

A long-standing question in speech perception research is how do listeners extract linguistic content from a highly variable acoustic input. In the domain of vowel perception, formant ratios, or the calculation of relative bark differences between vowel formants, have been a sporadically proposed solution. We propose a novel formant ratio algorithm in which the first (F1) and second (F2) forman...

Perception of synthetic speech continua through the sense of touch and audition was compared utilizing a 32-channel spectrally-oriented electrocutaneous vocoder display and standard auditory psychophysical procedures. Perception of a consonantal and a vocalic continuum was evaluated utilizing three vocoder filter configurations: logarithmic, linear, and average (geometric mean of logarithmic an...

Neuroethological investigations of mammalian and avian auditory systems have documented species-specific specializations for processing complex acoustic signals that could, if viewed in abstract terms, have an intriguing and striking relevance for human speech sound categorization and representation. Each species forms biologically relevant categories based on combinatorial analysis of informat...