This study examined cross-dialectal differences on the perception of Greek vowels. Speakers of Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and two dialectal areas (Crete, Kozani), all with five vowels in their systems, chose best exemplar locations (prototypes) for Greek vowels embedded in a carrier sentence spoken by a speaker of their dialect. The results showed that SMG, Cretan and Kozani vowels were well s...

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...

Sex differences in vowel acoustics were found to be mediated by words' frequency of use and phonological neighborhood density. Larger sex differences in vowel-space expansion were found for words with high frequency of use and for words with small phonological neighborhoods, than for words than for words with low frequency of use and high neighborhood density. Results suggest that talkers' prod...

Dysarthria is a speech motor disorder usually resulting in a substantive decrease in speech intelligibility by the general population. In this study, we have significantly improved the intelligibility of dysarthric vowels of one speaker from 48% to 54%, as evaluated by a vowel identification task using 64 CVC stimuli judged by 24 listeners. Improvement was obtained by transforming the vowels of...

This study explored the interaction between semantic predictability and regional dialect variation in an analysis of speech produced by college-aged female talkers from the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects of American English. Previous research on the effects of semantic predictability has shown that vowels in high semantic predictability contexts are temporally and spectrally reduced c...

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...

The articulatory range of a speaker has previously been estimated by the shape formed by first and second formant measurements of produced vowels. In a majority of the currently available metrics, formant frequency measurements are reduced to a single estimate for a condition, which has adverse consequences for subsequent statistical testing. Other metrics provide estimates of size of vowel art...

Abstract The evaluation of normalization methods sometimes focuses on the maximization vowel-space similarity. This focus can lead to adoption that erase legitimate phonetic variation from our data, is, overnormalization. First, a production corpus is presented highlights three types in formant patterns: uniform scaling, nonuniform and centralization. Then results two perceptual experiments are...

The papers Speaker Normalization of static and dynamic vowel spectral features by Zahorian and Jagharghi describe an algorithm for transforming the space of speech sounds so as to improve the accuracy of classiication. Classiication was accomplished by both back-propagation neural nets and by a Bayesian Maximum Likelihood method on the model of each vowel class being speciied by a gaussian dist...