Volume 41, Issue 2

We examined the spectral and perceptual characteristics of devoiced /si/ and /syu/ syllables in Japanese. Measurements showed that the deleted vowel can color the spectrum of the [∫] in these syllables, although the mean influence is small. Perception tests showed that Japanese listeners can use this spectral coloring as a cue to the identity of the underlying vowel, although identification was substantially worse than in syllables where the /i/ or /u/ is maintained. These results suggest that a supposedly lower-level coarticulation between the fricative and the vowel can occur before a higher-level process deletes the vowel, contradicting the order implied by traditional accounts of speech as a translation of discrete phonological units.

This paper examines the effects of vowel quality (formant frequencies), speaker and place of articulation of the surrounding consonants (/p/, /t/ or /k/) upon the duration of German vowels embedded in a fixed carrier sentence. The results obtained verify and complement known data from other investigations and make it possible to specify formulae, which can be used both in prosodic analysis and in automatic speech synthesis.

Three aspects of the fundamental frequency (F₀) pattern associated with the prosodic stress group in Standard Danish are examined in acoustic analyses of recordings by 4 speakers. (1) Evidence is presented that short stress groups will have F₀ patterns which are truncated rather than compressed editions of those found with longer stress groups. (2) The shape of the F₀ pattern can be considered basically invariant (for a given speaker) and independent of the segmental structure of the stress group, but its surface manifestation is modified by intrinsic F₀ level differences between vowels of different tongue height, and by intonational context. (3) F₀ patterns in extremely long prosodic stress groups are investigated.

A set of 9 CVC utterances were elicited five times each from a group of 5 anterior and 7 posterior aphasics. These spoken tokens were acoustically analyzed for the fundamental frequency of phonation and compared to tokens for a group of 7 normal control speakers. Statistical analyses revealed that anterior aphasics produced significantly higher average fundamental frequencies than did normal speakers, and that both groups of aphasics had significantly greater variability (both inter- and intraspeaker) in their fundamental frequency values than did normal speakers. A subset of these data was also analyzed for the period-to-period variation or ‘jitter’ of the acoustic waveform. Each group was significantly different from each other: posterior aphasics demonstrated the greatest period-to-period variation followed by anterior aphasics and then normal subjects. Some implications of this research are discussed.