Proceedings of the ... International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences最新文献

Several global and specific rhythm metrics and speech rate were used to characterize differences in the rhythms of 5- and 8-year-olds' spoken English. The results were that only speech rate and the rate-normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) differentiated between 5- and 8-year-olds' speech. A further result was that the variance in nPVI values was better explained by a specific measure devised to capture patterns of supralexical accenting than by the factor of age expressed in months. These results are taken to suggest that the protracted acquisition of English rhythm may be due in part to the slow rate at which children acquire prosodically conditioned vowel reduction.

Listeners' interactions often take place in auditorily challenging conditions. We examined how noise affects phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In a visual-world experiment, which allows us to examine the time-course of recognition, English participants listened to target words in quiet and in noise while they saw four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an onset overlap competitor (e.g. candy), an offset overlap competitor (e.g. sandal), and a distractor. The results showed that, while all competitors were relatively quickly suppressed in quiet listening conditions, listeners experienced persistent competition in noise from the offset competitor but not from the onset competitor. This suggests that listeners' phonological competitor activation persists for longer in noise than in quiet and that listeners are able to deactivate some unwanted competition when listening to speech in noise. The well-attested competition pattern in quiet was not replicated. Possible methodological explanations for this result are discussed.

We motivate and present a corpus of scripted and spontaneous speech in both the native and the non-native language of talkers from various language backgrounds. Using corpus recordings from 11 native English and 11 late Mandarin-English bilinguals we compared speech timing across native English, native Mandarin, and Mandarin-accented English. Findings showed similarities across native Mandarin and native English in speaking rate and in reduction of the number of acoustic relative to orthographic syllables. The two languages differed in silence-to-speech ratio and in the number of words between pauses, possibly reflecting phrase-level structural differences between English and Mandarin. Non-native English had a significantly slower speaking rate and lower rate of syllable reduction than both native English and native Mandarin. But, non-native English was similar to native English in terms of silence-to-speech ratio and was similar to native Mandarin in terms of words per pause. Finally, some talker-specificity in terms of (non)optimal speech timing appeared to transfer from native to non-native speech within the Mandarin-English bilinguals. These findings provide an empirical base for testing how language-dependent, structural features combine with general features of non-native speech production and with talker-dependent features in determining foreign-language speech production.

An understanding of the relationship of speech and language symptoms to lesions in the frontal region of the dominant hemisphere depends on a fuller description of the speech phenomena than can be provided by transcriptional or acoustic investigation alone. This paper provides examples of how articulatory movement tracking can aid in describing apraxic speech deficits.