Combinations Of Consonants Research Articles

Vowel classification based approach for Telugu Text-to-Speech System using symbol concatenation

Telugu is one of the oldest languages in India. This paper describes the development of Telugu Text-to-Speech System (TTS) using vowel classification. Vowels are most important class of sound in most Indian languages. The duration of vowel is longer than consonants and is most significant. Here vowels are categorized as starting middle and end according to the position of occurrence in a word. The algorithm developed by us involves analysis of a sentence in terms of words and then symbols involving combination of pure consonants and vowels. Wave files are being merged as per the requirement to generate the modified consonants influenced by deergalu (vowel sign) and yuktaksharas generate the speech from a text. Speech unit database consisting of vowels (starting, middle and end) and consonants is developed. We evaluated our TTS using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for intelligibility and voice quality with and without using vowel classification from sixty five listeners, and got better results with vowel classification.

Emergent literacy intervention appears effective for teaching sound letter correspondence and consonant–vowel–consonant spelling combinations to young children who use augmentative and alternative communication

This review provides a summary and appraisal commentary on the treatment review by Johnston, S. S., Davenport, L., Kanarowski, B., Rhodehouse, S., & McDonnell, A. P. (2009). Teaching sound letter correspondence and consonant-vowel-consonant combinations to your children who use augmentative and alternative communication. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 25, 123–135. Source of funding and disclosure of interest: No source of funding reported, and the original authors of this research report no conflicts of interest.

Choral Warm-Ups for Changing Adolescent Voices

How did you start your last choral rehearsal? Did you begin with the same warm-up procedures you used the day before (and the day before that)? Did you carefully choose the pitches of the vocalises so that each student could be successful, regardless of his or her current stage of vocal development? Did you design vocalises that addressed specific vocal issues found in the repertoire to be rehearsed that day? During two decades of observing and leading middle school choral rehearsals, I've discovered that teachers frequently repeat exactly the warm-ups they present to their young adolescent choirs at every rehearsal. If we know one thing about middle school students, we know that they are constantly changing-physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Why is it that our warm-ups usually don't reflect these changes? Think about this: if we start our warm-ups with a unison, descending, five-note, stepwise vocalise (sol, fa, mi, re, do) and then ascend sequentially by half steps for multiple repetitions, whom have we left out? Everyone who can't sing that pattern on those specific notes. We might say, Well, that kid can't match pitch, or he or she can't do X, Y, or Z. What if we were wrong? What if we simply hadn't selected an instructional task that was achievable by everyone in the ensemble? Over time, the effects on the musical self-confidence of those marginalized would be devastating, and there would be deleterious effects on the ensemble's performance. We would have failed to take advantage of what these young singers could do, instead focusing on what they physically couldn't do. Consider how young children learn to speak: they begin by babbling combinations of vowels and consonants and gradually refine and combine them to form words. We encourage young children to experiment with vocal sounds on the path toward speech, and we need to similarly encourage young adolescents to explore their new vocal capabilities made possible by the maturation process. The vocal warm-up processes used in choirs with changing adolescent voices must, in some ways, be different from the warm-up processes used in choirs of either early elementary children or older high school students. This article is an exploration of principles that need to underlie the development of warmups that meet the needs of changing voices, encourage even the most reluctant singer, and build toward ever-greater levels of choral success. In a Music Supervisors' Journal article printed more than 80 years ago, well-regarded pedagogue Charles Farnsworth wrote about the development of vocal technique:

Identifying Semitic Roots: Machine Learning with Linguistic Constraints

Words in Semitic languages are formed by combining two morphemes: a root and a pattern. The root consists of consonants only, by default three, and the pattern is a combination of vowels and consonants, with non-consecutive “slots” into which the root consonants are inserted. Identifying the root of a given word is an important task, considered to be an essential part of the morphological analysis of Semitic languages, and information on roots is important for linguistics research as well as for practical applications. We present a machine learning approach, augmented by limited linguistic knowledge, to the problem of identifying the roots of Semitic words. Although programs exist which can extract the root of words in Arabic and Hebrew, they are all dependent on labor-intensive construction of large-scale lexicons which are components of full-scale morphological analyzers. The advantage of our method is an automation of this process, avoiding the bottleneck of having to laboriously list the root and pattern of each lexeme in the language. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of machine learning to this problem, and one of the few attempts to directly address non-concatenative morphology using machine learning. More generally, our results shed light on the problem of combining classifiers under (linguistically motivated) constraints.

Speech Error Elicitation and Co-occurrence Restrictions in two Ethiopian Semitic Languages

This article reports the results of speech error elicitation experiments investigating the role of two consonant co-occurrence restrictions in the productive grammar of speakers of two Ethiopian Semitic languages, Amharic and Chaha. Higher error rates were found with consonant combinations that violated co-occurrence constraints than with those that had only a high degree of shared phonological similarity or low frequency of co-occurrence. Sequences that violated two constraints had the highest error rates. The results indicate that violations of consonant co-occurrence restrictions significantly increase error rates in the productions of native speakers, thereby supporting the psychological reality of the constraints.

Forgetting and redintegration of consonants and vowels in pseudoword lists

Immediate recall of phonemes was studied in a pseudoword span task. Finnish participants recalled lists of increasing length, consisting of C(consonant)V(vowel)CVCV pseudowords. The lists were made up from pools of 12 pseudowords. There were three types of lists. In the non‐redundant lists the items were unpredictable combinations of consonants and vowels. In consonant‐redundant lists, all items had the consonant frame /t/_/s/_/l/. In vowel‐redundant lists, all items had the vowel frame _/u/_/e/_/o/. Unlike redundant last syllables in a previous experiment, neither consonant nor vowel redundancy helped list recall. Instead, a harmful phonological similarity effect was apparent in the vowel‐redundant case but not the consonant‐redundant case. A phoneme‐level analysis of recall showed that consonants were recalled better in consonant‐redundant lists and vowels were recalled better in vowel‐redundant lists compared to non‐redundant lists. Vowels appeared to be more important for discrimination between items, with redundancy resulting in confusions. The consequences of phoneme‐level forgetting and redintegration for item‐ and list‐level recall are discussed.

Сочетаемость согласных в шорском языке

Сочетаемость согласных в шорском языке

Bernard N. Bachra (2001). The phonological structure of the verbal roots in Arabic and Hebrew. (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 34.) Leiden: Brill. Pp. xv+326.

Bachra takes a fresh look at the issue of phonotactic constraints in the consonantal verbal roots of the Semitic languages. This topic has received much previous attention, both descriptive and theoretical. The prevailing view is that consonant combinations in verbal roots are avoided when those consonants share major place of articulation features. For example, roots in Arabic containing both /b/ and /f/ are highly underrepresented, and these two consonants share [labial] place. In generative analyses, this constraint is considered to be an instantiation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), restricted to place of articulation features (e.g. McCarthy 1994). There are, of course, some complications. The constraint is partially sensitive to manner features, as combinations of coronal obstruents and coronal sonorants are permitted. In addition, the set of uvular, pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants is prohibited from co-occurring, indicating that shared place of articulation can be construed rather broadly. Finally, the constraint is gradient, rather than absolute. In many cases, consonant combinations that share place are found, but are just very infrequent.

The Evolution of the Kiswahili Syllable Structure

Kiswahili, the most extensively spoken language in Eastern Africa, has been described as the most dynamic and adaptable Bantu language, both structurally and lexically, in order to meet its expanded communicative roles. One of the major structural changes, which have occurred, is the reinforcement of the earlier syllable structure and the development of flexibility in the system so as to accommodate other consonant and vowel combinations in the onset and rhyme. This evolution has made Kiswahili unique among the Bantu languages.

Hyoid and tongue surface movements in speaking and eating

The human hyoid moves continuously in feeding, facilitating movements of the tongue surface and the processing and transport of food. The hypothesis that similar hyoid movements support tongue movements in speech was tested in 10 normal young adults of both sexes, who were recorded with lateral-projection videofluorography when feeding on hard and soft foods and when reading the ‘Grandfather Passage’, which includes the major vowel–consonant combinations in English. Recordings were made with and without tongue-markers. Images were analysed with a digital frame grabber and computer. Each participant served as his/her own control. The hyoid moved continuously during speech and feeding. In speech, hyoid motions were irregular and not linked to jaw movement, as they were for feeding. The centroids and variances of the domains for all reference points were compared for speech and feeding; the centroid represents the average position of a structure and variance its amount of motion. Gape and hyoid centroids were significantly different for feeding and speech ( P<0.001), but differences for gape averaged <1 mm while the difference for the hyoid centroid was >7 mm. There were no significant differences in gape attributable to sex. Consistent with the known differences in hyolaryngeal position there were significant sex differences in hyoid centroid ( P=0.031) but not variance. In speech, tongue-markers had a smaller spatial domain ( P=0.001) condensed within the larger feeding domain. The small shift in the gape centroid does not explain the larger forward shift of the hyoid during speech. These findings raise questions about the neuromotor control of hyoid position in the two behaviours and the biomechanics of the supralaryngeal vocal tract.

Wavelet parameters for speech synthesis

A standard method of analyzing human speech is to divide it into its constituent phonemes. Synthesizing speech from these phonemes without including the effects of coarticulation, however, can result in discontinuous and sometimes unintelligible sounds. A recently proposed model for the analysis of speech coarticulation uses wavelet system characterization where wavelet transforms describe the time-frequency behavior of a signal’s transmission channel. The objective of this research is to verify the proposed model by synthesizing the original speech from its analysis. The coarticulated speech in question is the consonant–vowel–consonant combination that occurs in words such as ‘‘deed’’ or ‘‘bib’’ where the two consonants are the same. These words along with their vowels spoken in isolation are recorded digitally and processed using the wavelet system model. The result is an analysis of the coarticulated word with respect to its vowel. The analysis shows in time and frequency how the vowel changes when spoken in context. Synthesizing the speech using the inverse process serves to verify the model. Comparing the result to the original speech reveals that the accuracy is determined mainly by the scale resolution of the wavelet transforms.

Performance of an MPSK correlation demodulator with decision feedback carrier recovery in the presence of a speech signal

The performance of a Correlation Demodulator (CD) with Decision Feedback Carrier Recovery (DFCR) in a channel with an additive mixture of a speech signal and a Gaussian background noise as interference is analyzed. The MPSK modulation format is considered. Expressions of energy loss due to the influence of the speech signal and of the probability of error are obtained. For this purpose the speech signal is considered as a random combination of vowels, consonants and pauses. Moreover, the vowels as well as the consonants are modeled as the response of some Linear Time Invariant (LTI) systems to white Gaussian noise. An experiment was performed. Good agreement with the theoretical results was obtained.

Neuronal activity in the human lateral temporal lobe. I. Responses to speech.

Single and multiple unit neuronal activity was recorded from the cortex of the lateral temporal lobe in conscious humans during open brain surgery for the treatment of epilepsy. Recordings were obtained from the right and left superior, middle and inferior temporal gyrus of 34 patients (41 recording sites). Recordings were restricted to regions to be resected during subsequent surgery. This excluded recordings from language areas proper. Neuronal responses to words and sentences presented over a loudspeaker and during free conversation were recorded. No significant differences between the right and left hemisphere were obvious. All neurons in the superior temporal gyrus responded to various aspects of spoken language with temporally well defined activation/inhibition patterns, but not or only little to non-linguistic noises or tones. Excitatory responses were typically short or prolonged (up to several hundred ms) bursts of discharges at rates above 20/sec, reaching peak rates of 50-100/s. Such responses could be specifically related to certain combinations of consonants suggesting a function in categorization, they could depend on word length, could differentiate between polysyllabic and compound words of the same length or could be unspecifically related to language as such. No formant specific responses were found, but the prolonged excitations across syllables suggest that consonant/vowel combinations may play a role for some activation patterns. Responses of some neurons (or neuronal populations) depended on the attention paid to the words and sentences, or the task connected with them (repeat words, speech addressed to the patient demanding something). Neurons in the middle and inferior temporal gyrus were only little affected by listening to single words or sentences, but some were unspecifically activated by words or while listening to sentences. Excitatory responses varied within a limited range of discharge rates usually below 5-10/s. Phonetic distortion of spoken language could reduce responses in superior temporal gyrus neurons, but also the slight changes in discharge rate of middle temporal neurons could be absent during distorted and uncomprehensible speech sounds. We conclude that superior temporal gyrus neuron responses reflect some general phonetic but not semantic aspects of spoken language. Middle and inferior temporal gyrus neurons do not signal phonetic aspects of language, but may be involved in understanding language under certain conditions.

Consonant clusters and abutting consonants in english and arabic, implications and applications

English and Arabic are two languages that differ greatly in the range of the syllable structure patterns they make use of. A direct corollary to this is the difference in the extent to which each language permits consonant clusters. Generally speaking, Arabic is a l.anguage that is poor in clusters when compared to English. Thus great interference is expected when English assumes the status of the target language for the native speakers of Arabic. The problem of consonant clusters is, in fact, an area worthy of investigation whenever contrastive Arabic-English studies are intended. Studies pertinent to consonant clusters fall into two major categories: 1 those that define a cluster as a combination of consonants occurring in a sequence within a word (Al-Hamash and Abdullah 1976; Al-Hamash 1977; Behnam and Al-Hamash 1975; Marouf 1974; Nasr 1967) or even across a word boundary (Sanderson 1965); and 2 those that define it as a combination of consonants occurring in a sequence within a syllable (Abercombie 1967; Malick 1957). The difference between these two definitions is not merely terminological. Unless the investigator made a clear-cut distinction between the two definitions he would lay himself open to the charge of overlooking many significant linguistic and pedagogical implications. This paper attempts to illustrate these implications together with the applications that ensue. It is worth mentioning, however, that we follow Abercrombie in differentiating between the above two definitions by using the term ‘consonant cluster’ as opposed to that of ‘abutting consonants’. The former, according to Abercrombie, denotes II sequence of more than one consonant which is restricted to one syllable. But if the sequence of consonants spreads over two syllables within a word then it is a sequence of abutting consonants. It is not irrelevant to point out that for the purpose of this paper we should elaborate on the latter term in the sense that sequences of consonants at syllable boundaries are not simply the result of one consonant abutting on another. They may assume the following possibilities: a consonant abutting on another a consonant abutting on a cluster a cluster abutting on a consonant a cluster abutting on another.

The Effect on Children’s Performance of a Discrepancy between Adult Expectancy and Feedback Statements

Ninety-six high-achieving fourth-graders performed a memory task before which either positive or negative expectancy statements were made by an adult and after which either positive or negative feedback statements were given. The resulting dissonant or consonant expectancy-feedback combinations were delivered over a four-day period. Results indicated that for high IQ children, performance was higher for those given discrepant rather than consonant combinations of expectancy-feedback statements. However, for low IQ children, performance was higher when given negative rather than positive feedback regardless of expectancy. The results are discussed in light of an uncertainty theory of motivation and arousal.

Word Mediation and Generalization in Beginning Readers

It has been theorized that children learning to read identify, retain, and use regular spelling-to-sound vowel and consonant combinations to decode unknown words. Some research indicates that the use of letter combinations to mediate unknown words is developmental, and generated by reading experience. One hundred and seventy-seven first and second grade students were administered a reading achievement test and three spelling pattern tests of vowel combinations to determine if accelerated beginning readers learning to recognize words with and without formal instruction differ from average and low beginning readers in the kind and amount of grapheme-phoneme correspondences they can pronounce. The data indicate that beginning readers with advanced word recognition skills may use different word mediation strategies, identify letter combinations that are rule related, and recognize spelling patterns that are defined as higher ordered correspondences. Previous method of instruction, age, and school did not influence test performance. Advanced readers at first and second grade induced more spelling patterns regardless of presentation. The study supports several contentions made by different theorists about how children learn to read, and specifically, endorses the position of Gibson (1971) that some form of perceptual learning occurs without intention and instruction as the child's reading experiences increase.

Rated graphic distinctiveness of consonants

Mean ratings of graphic distinctiveness were obtained for pairs of consonants. The comparisons were between uppercase forms of different consonants, lowercase forms of different consonants, and uppercase vs lowercase forms of the same consonants. The ratings were demonstrated to have satisfactory reliability and to covary moderately well with feature-component measures of letter-pair distinctiveness. The present study presents normative data for the gra phic distinctiveness of pairs of consonants. Specifically, ratings of graphic distinctiveness were obtained for all combinations of paired consonants in both their uppercase and lowercase forms, together with comparisons between the uppercase and lowercase forms of each consonant. The norms supplement Gibson's (1969) feature-component system of measuring letter-pair distinctiveness, a system based on the percentage of physical features shared by letters. However, Gibson's system is applicable only to uppercase comparisons. Moreover, gradations of distinctiveness are somewhat limited by the relatively few physical features employed. Letters obviously vary in the extent of their distinctiveness. Variation in distinctiveness, in turn, is likely to be related to performance on tasks requiring discriminations between letters, whether the letters occur as individual items or as elements of words serving as items. These tasks include letter identification (e.g., Thompson & Massaro, 1973), same-different letter judgments (e.g., Krueger, 1973), and recognition learning (e.g., Kausler & Pavur, in press), and they in vo I ve discriminations between both nominally different letters (e.g., B vs P) and nominally identical letters (e.g., B vs b). The present norms should facilitate such research by extending the material available for selecting consonant pairs of differential distinctiveness. METHOD

The confusion of English consonant clusters in lipreading.

Confusions in the lipreading of initial consonant clusters were investigated. Responses were obtained from 275 subjects asked to identify by lipreading 32 cluster-vowel nonsense syllables spoken by three different speakers. The results indicated that the consonant clusters were highly confused in lipreading, since they were incorrectly perceived 89% of the time. The clusters were seen most frequently as single consonants followed in frequency by identification as other consonant combinations. The confusions for each stimulus cluster were tested statistically to determine whether their frequency of occurrence might be attributable to chance. The confusions found not to be attributable to chance fell into seven visually contrastive groups. Confusions among sounds produced in similar articulatory positions were prominent.

Investigation of the timing of velar movements during speech.

High-speed cinefluorographic films were taken of four normal subjects speaking English sentences containing various combinations of nasal consonants (N), consonants (C), and vowels (V) at normal speaking levels and rates of production. Word and syllable boundaries were designed to fall across the sequences in various ways. From frame-by-frame tracings, measures of velar movement and velopharyngeal opening were made. Results indicate extensive anticipatory coarticulation of velar movement toward velopharyngeal opening in CVN and CVVN sequences such that velar movement toward opening began during the approach to the initial vowel in all cases and some velopharyngeal opening was observed on all vowels. For NC and NCN sequences, velar movement toward closure for the consonant usually began during the preceding nasal such that some velar closure was observed during all plosive and fricative consonants used. These results directly contradict the hypothesis that a CV-type syllable is the minimal unit of coarticulation and production. The data are consistent with the predictions of a model which assumes phone-sized input unit and which incorporates a “look ahead” mechanism whereby an articulatory feature can be systematically anticipated prior to the occurrence of the phone with which that feature is associated.

Pitch and Sentence Intonation

Spectrograms of utterances consisting of various combinations of consonants and vowels were studied in order to determine what voice fundamental-frequency fluctuations are predictable from segmental structure. Questions and statements with different stress patterns were also recorded and studied. After corrections were made for predictable coarticulation effects, a characteristic fo contour was found to be associated with each sentence type. This relationship turned out to be a complex one; i.e., there is marked interaction between various stress patterns and sentence types. For example, the extent of terminal pitch rise in question sentences is affected by the relative positions of stress-bearing elements in the sentences. The observed effect can be explained by postulating differences in rates of lung volume change during the breath groups corresponding to different stress patterns. These findings seem to suggest that the perception of prominence and question intonation involves a special decoding device (be it innate or learned) that combines acoustic data with “knowledge” about articulation to derive the underlying linguistically relevant, phonemic intonation contour.