Recently there has been great interest in geometricallymotivated approaches to data analysis and pattern recognition. Low-dimensional structure in higher-dimensional data can be exploited by manifold-based data reduction and learning algorithms to improve performance. The existence of such a structure in speech has not been formally documented. Toward this end, I present a derivation of the app...

PURPOSE The aim of the current study was to survey if vowel articulation in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) shows specific changes in the course of the disease. METHOD 67 patients with PD (42 male) and 40 healthy speakers (20 male) were tested and retested after an average time interval of 34 months. Participants had to read a given text as source for subsequent calculation of the tria...

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...

European Portuguese (EP) L2 learners often state that their listening skills cannot cope with spontaneous speech. In fact, one well-known characteristic of EP that distinguishes it from Brazilian Portuguese in particular, is the strong use of vowel reduction and simplification of consonantal clusters, both within words and across word boundaries [1]. Vowel reduction can result in vowel devoicin...

Humans are reasonably good at sensing when others are depressed. In particular, our hearing is attuned to the voice-related changes often exhibited during depression. But could computers also be taught to “hear” depression in everyday conversations outside a lab, even to the point of being able to make a clinical diagnosis? In their article “Self-Reported Symptoms of Depression and PTSD Are Ass...

In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners ́ responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and...

Vowel devoicing is a common phonological process in many languages and typically involves high vowels and schwa. High vowels and schwa are inherently short (Bell, 1978; Dauer 1980) and the process usually occurs when the vowels are either adjacent to, or surrounded by, voiceless consonants, during which the glottis is fully open. It is thought that vowel devoicing is a consequence of articulato...

Compared to stress-timed English, mora-timed Japanese is characterized by a simpler syllabic structure and no vowel reduction. Such differences may explain some aspects of the problems that Japanese talkers have in producing English speech rhythm, i.e., an L1 influence on L2 rhythm production. The present study tested whether this L1 influence on L2 could be moderated by an increase in L2 exper...