A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress…

This study investigates the phonetic implementation of stress in American English compounds by measuring the interaction of stress cues with different intonation patterns. Participants in an experiment produced compounds and phrases such as "greenhouse" and "green house" in different prosodic positions and sentence types to elicit the contrast in…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

Previous studies have shown that a subset of gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) and heterosexual adults produce distinctive patterns of phonetic variation that allow listeners to detect their sexual orientation from audio-only samples of read speech. The current investigation examined the extent to which judgments of sexual orientation from speech…

Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know…

Fricative spectral data are compared with articulatory data from electropalatographic (EPG) recordings in an investigation of coarticulatory effects on the acoustic signal. Data were taken from CV tokens produced by four female speakers of Australian English. Results are presented for coronal fricatives in seven monothong vowel contexts.…

Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both…

The objective of this study was to determine how bilinguals' age at the time of language acquisition influenced the organization of their phonetic system(s). The productions of six English and five Korean vowels by English and Korean monolinguals were compared to the productions of the same vowels by early and late Korean-English bilinguals…