Duration and rate effects on American English vowel identification by native Danish listeners

2002 ◽  
Vol 112 (5) ◽  
pp. 2250-2250
Author(s):  
Terry L. Gottfried ◽  
Ocke‐Schwen Bohn
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Rate Effects

Auditory-Motor Formant Tracking: A Study of Speech Imitation

1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. Kent
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Contrast Effect ◽  
American English ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Preliminary Identification ◽  
Formant Tracking ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Speech Imitation

Auditory-motor formant tracking, or the vocal reproduction of formant patterns, is one aspect of speech imitation skill. The study reported here assessed the ability of four adult speakers to imitate synthesized vocalic stimuli. These stimuli took the form of two steady-state segments joined by a transitional segment. The first steady-state segment corresponded to one of eight American English vowels, and the second, to one of 14 vowels that were not expected to have a prominent phonemic identity in the language. Spectrographic analyses of the imitative responses allowed comparisons of the formant structure for the synthesized stimuli and the corresponding human reproductions. Analyses of the spectrograms revealed that the directions of movement for the first two formants were almost always reproduced accurately, but the extent of movement frequently was overshot. These responses were judged to be consistent with a contrast effect in speech perception, a phenomenon previously discovered in experiments on vowel identification. The variability of formant reproduction for a given vowel was predicted at least roughly by the ambiguity of the stimulus in a preliminary identification experiment. These results suggest that the responses in an imitation task are intermediate in dimensionality to the responses in discrimination and identification tasks.

Speaking rate effects on vowel identification in natural sentence contexts

1999 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 1402-1402
Author(s):  
Adam M. Berman ◽  
Jonathan S. Neville ◽  
Terry L. Gottfried
Keyword(s):  
Speaking Rate ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Rate Effects

The effects of identification training on the identification and production of American English vowels by native speakers of Japanese

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN G. LAMBACHER ◽  
WILLIAM L. MARTENS ◽  
KAZUHIKO KAKEHI ◽  
CHANDRAJITH A. MARASINGHE ◽  
GARRY MOLHOLT
Keyword(s):  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
Training Procedure ◽  
Identification Performance ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Positive Effect

The effectiveness of a high variability identification training procedure to improve native Japanese identification and production of the American English (AE) mid and low vowels /æ/, //, //, //, // was investigated. Vowel identification and production performance for two groups of Japanese participants was measured before and after a 6-week identification training period. Recordings were made of both group's pre-/posttraining vowel productions of the five vowels, which were evaluated by a group of native AE listeners using a five-alternative, forced-choice identification task and by an acoustic analysis of the vowel productions. The overall results confirmed that the identification performance of the experimental (trained) participants improved after identification training with feedback and that the training also had a positive effect on their production of the target AE vowels.

scholarly journals Rate effects on Southern American English VOT

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Paul A. Morris
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Speaking Rate ◽  
Rate Effects ◽  
Southern American English

This study examines the effect of speaking rate on VOT durations of initial stops in Southern American English (SAE). English is claimed to have a two-way contrast between long-lag (fortis) and short-lag (lenis) stops, but lenis stops in SAE have been shown to be produced with prevoicing rather than short-lag VOT. This study examines whether SAE lenis stops are specified for privative voice or if prevoicing is an example of contrastive emphasis. Similar to rate effects found in other languages, the data here support the conclusion that SAE does have phonologically specified privative voice in the lenis stop.

Effects of dialect on vowel acoustics and intelligibility

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Austin L. Oder ◽  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Sarah Hargus Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Identification Accuracy ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Error Patterns ◽  
Perceptual Differences ◽  
English Vowels

A great deal of recent research has focused on phonetic variation among American English vowels from different dialects. This body of research continues to grow as vowels continuously undergo diachronic formant changes that become characteristic of certain dialects. Two experiments using the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper & Pisoni 2006a) explored whether the Midland dialect is more closely related acoustically and perceptually to the Mid-Atlantic or to the Southern dialect. The goal of this study was to further our understanding of acoustic and perceptual differences between two of the most marked dialects (Mid-Atlantic and Southern) and one of the least marked dialects (Midland) of American English. Ten vowels in /hVd/ context produced by one male talker from each of these three dialects were acoustically analyzed and presented to Midland listeners for identification. The listeners showed the greatest vowel identification accuracy for the Mid-Atlantic talker (95.2%), followed by the Midland talker (92.5%), and finally the Southern talker (79.7%). Vowel error patterns were consistent with vowel acoustic differences between the talkers. The results suggest that, acoustically and perceptually, the Midland and Mid-Atlantic dialects are more similar than are the Midland and Southern dialects.

Acquisition of second-language speech: Effects of visual cues, context, and talker variability

2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEBRA M. HARDISON
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
American English ◽  
Identification Accuracy ◽  
Talker Variability ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Production Improvement ◽  
Word Position

The influence of a talker's face (e.g., articulatory gestures) and voice, vocalic context, and word position were investigated in the training of Japanese and Korean English as a second language learners to identify American English /[invertedr]/ and /l/. In the pretest–posttest design, an identification paradigm assessed the effects of 3 weeks of training using multiple natural exemplars on videotape. Word position, adjacent vowel, and training type (auditory–visual [AV] vs. auditory only; multiple vs. single talker for Koreans) were independent variables. Findings revealed significant effects of training type (greater improvement with AV), talker, word position, and vowel. Identification accuracy generalized successfully to novel stimuli and a new talker. Transfer to significant production improvement was also noted. These findings are compatible with episodic models for the encoding of speech in memory.

Distinctiveness and Assimilation in Vowel Perception in a Second Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4534-4543
Author(s):  
Wei Hu ◽  
Sha Tao ◽  
Mingshuang Li ◽  
Chang Liu
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Vowel Perception ◽  
Perceptual Distance ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Chinese Counterpart ◽  
Vowel Categories

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate how the distinctive establishment of 2nd language (L2) vowel categories (e.g., how distinctively an L2 vowel is established from nearby L2 vowels and from the native language counterpart in the 1st formant [F1] × 2nd formant [F2] vowel space) affected L2 vowel perception. Method Identification of 12 natural English monophthongs, and categorization and rating of synthetic English vowels /i/ and /ɪ/ in the F1 × F2 space were measured for Chinese-native (CN) and English-native (EN) listeners. CN listeners were also examined with categorization and rating of Chinese vowels in the F1 × F2 space. Results As expected, EN listeners significantly outperformed CN listeners in English vowel identification. Whereas EN listeners showed distinctive establishment of 2 English vowels, CN listeners had multiple patterns of L2 vowel establishment: both, 1, or neither established. Moreover, CN listeners' English vowel perception was significantly related to the perceptual distance between the English vowel and its Chinese counterpart, and the perceptual distance between the adjacent English vowels. Conclusions L2 vowel perception relied on listeners' capacity to distinctively establish L2 vowel categories that were distant from the nearby L2 vowels.

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