Vowels In Words Research Articles

Fonem Deret Vokal dalam Bahasa Indonesia

The existence of word vowel phonemes in all languages, including in Indonesian is very dominant. All words in their internal structure must be found in phonemes. As a result of the existence of a very dominant vowel phoneme, its existence is able to form what is called a phoneme vocal sequence.The application of research theory in connection with efforts to describe vowel series phonemes is based on the linguistic theory of the phonological field of the phonemic subfield. Because the study focuses on the smallest unit of language sounds, namely phonemes. The research implementation is based on three strategic stages, namely: 1. provision of data, 2. classification and analysis of data, 3. preparation / writing of reports.The findings of the data are more secondary, so the findings of the data focus on the availability of references, so that the existence of a large Indonesian language dictionary acts as a "smart" book. The findings of primary data are relatively difficult to do.There are seven kinds of vocal phonemes, namely / a, i, u, ê, é, è, o /. The seven vowel phonemes are relatively capable of forming vowel phonemes, so that in the end a table can be made from each of the seven vowel phonemes in question.

Restoring Arabic vowels through omission-tolerant dictionary lookup

Vowels in Arabic are optional orthographic symbols written as diacritics above or below letters. In Arabic texts, typically more than 97 percent of written words do not explicitly show any of the vowels they contain; that is to say, depending on the author, genre and field, less than 3 percent of words include any explicit vowel. Although numerous studies have been published on the issue of restoring the omitted vowels in speech technologies, little attention has been given to this problem in papers dedicated to written Arabic technologies.f In this research, we present Arabic-Unitex, an Arabic Language Resource, with emphasis on vowel representation and encoding. Specifically, we present two dozens of rules formalizing a detailed description of vowel omission in written text. They are typographical rules integrated into large-coverage resources for morphological annotation. For restoring vowels, our resources are capable of identifying words in which the vowels are not shown, as well as words in which the vowels are partially or fully included. By taking into account these rules, our resources are able to compute and restore for each word form a list of compatible fully vowelized candidates through omission-tolerant dictionary lookup. Our program performs the analysis of 5000 words/second for running text (20 pages/second). Based on these comprehensive linguistic resources, we created a spell checker that detects any invalid/misplaced vowel in a fully or partially vowelized form. Finally, our resources provide a lexical coverage of more than 99 percent of the words used in popular newspapers, and restore vowels in words (out of context) simply and efficiently.

Vowel formant dispersion in apraxia of speech and aphasia: repeated elicitation versus spontaneous speech.

Vowel formant dispersion in apraxia of speech and aphasia: repeated elicitation versus spontaneous speech.

Neural Entrainment Determines the Words We Hear

Low-frequency neural entrainment to rhythmic input has been hypothesized as a canonical mechanism that shapes sensory perception in time. Neural entrainment is deemed particularly relevant for speech analysis, as it would contribute to the extraction of discrete linguistic elements from continuous acoustic signals. However, its causal influence in speech perception has been difficult to establish. Here, we provide evidence that oscillations build temporal predictions about the duration of speech tokens that affect perception. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we studied neural dynamics during listening to sentences that changed in speech rate. We observed neural entrainment to preceding speech rhythms persisting for several cycles after the change in rate. The sustained entrainment was associated with changes in the perceived duration of the last word's vowel, resulting in the perception of words with different meanings. These findings support oscillatory models of speech processing, suggesting that neural oscillations actively shape speech perception.

The Persian version of auditory word discrimination test (P-AWDT) for children: Development, validity, and reliability

ObjectiveAuditory discrimination of speech sounds is an important perceptual ability and a precursor to the acquisition of language. Auditory information is at least partially necessary for the acquisition and organization of phonological rules. There are few standardized behavioral tests to evaluate phonemic distinctive features in children with or without speech and language disorders. The main objective of the present study was the development, validity, and reliability of the Persian version of auditory word discrimination test (P-AWDT) for 4-8-year-old children. MethodsA total of 120 typical children and 40 children with speech sound disorder (SSD) participated in the present study. The test comprised of 160 monosyllabic paired-words distributed in the Forms A-1 and the Form A-2 for the initial consonants (80 words) and the Forms B-1 and the Form B-2 for the final consonants (80 words). Moreover, the discrimination of vowels was randomly included in all forms. Content validity was calculated and 50 children repeated the test twice with two weeks of interval (test–retest reliability). Further analysis was also implemented including validity, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), Cronbach's alpha (internal consistency), age groups, and gender. ResultsThe content validity index (CVI) and the test-retest reliability of the P-AWDT were achieved 63%–86% and 81%-96%, respectively. Moreover, the total Cronbach’s alpha for the internal consistency was estimated relatively high (0.93). Comparison of the mean scores of the P-AWDT in the typical children and the children with SSD revealed a significant difference. The results revealed that the group with SSD had greater severity of deficit than the typical group in auditory word discrimination. In addition, the difference between the age groups was statistically significant, especially in 4–4.11-year-old children. The performance of the two gender groups was relatively same. ConclusionThe comparison of the P-AWDT scores between the typical children and the children with SSD demonstrated differences in the capabilities of auditory phonological discrimination in both initial and final positions. It supposed that the P-AWDT meets the appropriate validity and reliability criteria. The P-AWDT test can be utilized to measure the distinctive features of phonemes, the auditory discrimination of initial and final consonants and middle vowels of words in 4-8-year-old typical children and children with SSD.

The phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation in natural speech

Abstract Evidence suggests that speakers hyperarticulate phonetic cues to word identity in a way that increases phonetic distance to similar competitors. However, the degree and type of phonetic similarity between competitors which induces hyperarticulation remains unclear. Here, we compared neighborhood density (as a representative of a phonetically-general type of similarity) to the existence of a phonetic cue-specific lexical minimal pair in terms of their ability to predict hyperarticulation of two different cue-types in a corpus of natural English speech. For all phonetic cues that we investigated – word-initial voiceless stop VOT, word-initial voiced stop VOT, and vowel-vowel Euclidean formant distance – cue-specific minimal pair existence significantly predicted cue hyperarticulation, while neighborhood density did not. Further, the direction of change in a phonetic cue was found not to be consistent within a given cue-type, but instead varied as a function of the phonetic relationship, creating greater phonetic distance to the competitor. For tokens of word-initial voiceless stops, existence of a voiced-stop minimal pair predicted significantly longer VOT, while for word-initial voiced stops, existence of a voiceless-stop minimal pair predicted a shorter VOT. For tokens of vowels, existence of a minimal pair defined by a nearby vowel predicted greater Euclidean distance in formant space from that vowel, rather than greater expansion of the vowel space per se. For example, lax vowels in words with a more peripheral vowel minimal pair competitor (e.g., ship ∼ sheep) were relatively centralized, while tense vowels in words with a more interior vowel minimal pair competitor (e.g., date ∼ debt) were relatively peripheralized.

ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА РЕЧИ ДЕТЕЙ 6-7 ЛЕТ С РАССТРОЙСТВАМИ АУТИСТИЧЕСКОГО СПЕКТРА И СИНДРОМОМ ДАУНА

In this work, the data on the features of speech development in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and with Down syndrome (DS) are presented. Methods of perceptual experiment and instrumental analysis were used. It is shown that in typically developing (TD) children the values of vowel articulation index of stressed vowels in words are maximal in comparison with the corresponding characteristic in children with ASD and children with DS. The words of children with ASD are characterized by high pitch values of words and stressed vowels as well as high values of vowel articulation index. The words of children with DS, besides high pitch values of words and stressed vowels noticed for children with ASD, had maximum duration of words and stressed vowels, low values of the vowel articulation index of stressed vowels. In children with DS, more types of consonant phonemes were not formed compared to children with ASD and TD ones; in addition, children with DS used consonants that do not exist in the Russian language.

Dagara Tongue-Root Vowel Harmony

Though tongue-root vowel harmony in many Ghanaian languages has been described, there still remain many others which have received little or no description at all. Dagara, a dialect of Dagaare a Mabia language, is one of such dialects. This paper presents a description of Dagara tongue-root vowel harmony using Autosegmental Theory. The paper reveals that Dagara has bi-directional [ATR] harmony with [+ATR] vowels being the triggers of the harmonic process. In the progressive harmony processes, the [+ATR] feature of stem vowels causes [-ATR] vowels of suffixes to change to harmonize with them; in a regressive harmony process, [+ATR] vowels of the suffixes have dominance over those of stems and cause them to change to harmonize. The paper also shows that [f] is an opaque consonant, and blocks [+ATR] harmony spread from stems to suffix vowels. The opacity effect is however unidirectional as there is no evidence of such restriction in left-to-right harmony. The paper concludes that, there is a strict co-occurrence restriction on vowels of words in Dagara.

Phonological neighborhood density and intra-speaker variation in vowel production

Words’ phonetic characteristics are affected by numerous lexical factors. Wright (2004) showed that words’ phonological neighborhood density (PND) affects the production of vowels. Vowels in words with high PND are hyperarticulated relative to the same vowels in low-PND words. Wright interpreted this as evidence that speech production accommodates listeners’ presumed needs: high-PND words are hyper-articulated because they are generally harder to perceive than low-PND words (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998). This effect has been the subject of numerous recent studies, including ones by Munson and Solomon (2004) and Munson (2013) that replicated the effect, and ones by Buz and Jaeger (2016) and Gahl, Yao, and Johnson (2012) that did not. One possible explanation for Wright’s original effect is that the ease with which low-density words are perceived allows speakers more freedom to produce the sounds in them variably, including under-articulating them. If this is true, then we would predict that the acoustic characteristics of low-PND words would show more trial-to-trial variability than those of high-PND words. To examine this, we recorded 19 speakers saying 10 repetitions each of high- and low-PND CVC words. The F1 and F2 frequencies of the vowels were measured. For each token, the distance from the center of each speaker’s F1/F2 space was computed. The coefficient of variation for this measure was higher (i.e., more variable) for low-PND words than for high-PND words, t[18]=−2.80, p = 0.011.

An Acoustic Investigation of The Duration of Vowel Nasalization in Ga

Relationship between vowel quality and nasalization has seen a number of investigations in languages with results indicating that the duration of nasalization varies with the quality of vowel. While some of the investigations reported that greater velopharyngeal opening occurs in mid-high and high back vowels in some languages, other investigation results show that low vowels are nasalized with greater velopharyngeal opening than high vowels in some other languages. It has been argued that in vowel nasalization low vowels are preferred because low vowels have longer duration in that long vowels are more likely to be nasalized than short vowels. This study sets out to investigate the relationship between the quality of vowels and nasalization in Ga by using acoustic measures. The study makes use of four native Ga speakers’ production of oral and nasal vowels in words. The words were recorded in a carrier frame and was analysed using PRAAT. The results indicate that nasal vowels have longer duration than oral vowels and the nasal part of the nasal vowel is longer in high vowels than it is in the low vowels. Generally, the nasal portion of the nasal vowel has longer duration than the oral portion of the vowel. Also, the Front vowels seem to have longer nasal portions than the back vowels. Another observation from the analysis was that the nasal vowels have higher F1 and F2 values than the oral vowel. Thus, the amount of nasalization in Ga vowels is influenced by the quality of vowel.

F0 and plosive voicing in Afrikaans

Afrikaans plosives are traditionally described as contrasting in voicing ([b d] vs. [p t]). Coetzee et al. (2014, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2421), however, showed that the voicing contrast is collapsing word-initially, with voiced plosives merging with voiceless plosives. They also found that voicing loss does not result in loss of lexical contrast, which is preserved on the following vowel (high f0 after historically voiceless and low f0 after historically voiced plosives). That study investigated word-initial plosives, leaving unanswered whether word-medial plosives are also devoicing. The current study addresses this question. Acoustic analysis of data collected from nine Afrikaans speakers replicated the results of Coetzee et al. for word-initial plosives. For word-medial plosives, a robust voicing contrast was found along with a post-plosive f0 difference. The f0 difference in medial position was comparable to that in initial position in both magnitude and duration, and extended throughout the vowel. While lexical contrasts are hence cued by only f0 word initially, they are differentiated by both plosive voicing and the f0 of the following vowel word medially. The relevance of these results for theories of sound change and theories of phonological contrast will be discussed. [Work supported by NSF.]

Effects of Lexical Competition and Dialect Exposure on Phonological Priming

A cross-modal lexical decision task was used to explore the effects of lexical competition and dialect exposure on phonological form priming. Relative to unrelated auditory primes, matching real word primes facilitated lexical decision for visual real word targets, whereas competing minimal pair primes inhibited lexical decision. These effects were robust across two English vowel pairs (mid-front and low-front) and for two listener groups (mono-dialectal and multi-dialectal). However, both the most robust facilitation and the most robust inhibition were observed for the mid-front vowel words with few phonological competitors for the mono-dialectal listener group. The mid-front vowel targets were acoustically more distinct than the low-front vowel targets, suggesting that acoustic-phonetic similarity leads to stronger lexical competition and less robust facilitation and inhibition. The multi-dialectal listeners had more prior exposure to multiple different dialects than the mono-dialectal group, suggesting that long-term exposure to linguistic variability contributes to a more flexible processing strategy in which lexical competition extends over a longer period of time, leading to less robust facilitation and inhibition.

Infant Recognition of Hebrew Vocalic Word Patterns

The ability of infants to recognize phonotactic patterns in their native language is widely acknowledged. However, the specific ability of infants to recognize patterns created by nonadjacent vowels in words has seldom been investigated. In Semitic languages such as Hebrew, groups of multisyllabic words are identical in their nonadjacent vowel sequences and stress position but differ in the consonants interposed between the vowels. The goals of this study were to assess whether infants learning Hebrew show a preference for (1) a nonadjacent vocalic pattern or template, common in Hebrew nouns (CeCeC), over a nonattested nonadjacent vocalic pattern (CoCoC), and (2) a nonadjacent vocalic pattern common in Hebrew words (CaCoC) over an existing but less common pattern (CaCeC). Twenty Hebrew-learning infants aged 8 to 11 months were presented with lists of nonsense words featuring the first two patterns (Experiment 1), and 20 were presented with nonsense words featuring the second two patterns (Experiment 2). The results showed longer listening to CeCeC than to CoCoC lists and to CaCoC than to CaCeC lists, suggesting that infants recognized the common nonadjacent vocalic patterns in both cases. The study thus demonstrates that Hebrew-learning infants are able to disregard the intervening consonants within words and generalize their vocalic pattern to previously unheard nonwords, whether this pattern includes identical or different vowels and regardless of the rhythmic pattern of the word (trochaic or iambic). Analysis of the occurrence of the relevant vowel patterns in input speech in three Hebrew corpora (two addressed to children and one to adults) suggests that exposure to these patterns in words underlies the infants' preferences.

Differences in phonologic and prosodic abilities in children with phonological language impairment and phonological-grammatical language impairment assessed with non-word repetition

Prosody can be described as the rhythmic, dynamic, and melodic aspects of language. Swedish has a relatively complex prosodic system compared to, for example, English. A large percentage of Swedish children with language impairment show prosodic problems to some extent. In the present study, non-word repetition was used to assess the phonological and prosodic abilities in children with phonological language impairment and children with phonological-grammatical language impairment. In the study, 10 children with phonological language impairment and 14 children with phonological-grammatical language impairment from 4;3 to 6;2 years of age participated. All children heard the same recorded non-words and words. The group with phonological language impairment received higher scores in all variables, compared to the group with phonological-grammatical language impairment. The results showed significant differences between the groups regarding production of vowels correct in words and production of phonemes correct in non-words as well as production of unstressed syllables in non-words and production of correct stress in non-words. Percent correctly produced vowels in words, but not in non-words, correlated significantly with grammatical ability.

Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English

This study examines change over time in coarticulatory vowel nasality in both real and apparent time in Philadelphia English. We measure nasal-adjacent vowels in words from a corpus of conversational speech and find systematic, community-level changes in degree of nasal coarticulation over time in Philadelphia. Specifically, in all speakers who were under the age of 25 when interviewed, there is an overall trend of increasing nasality in people born between 1950 and 1965, yet people born after 1965 move towards less nasality than speakers born earlier; finally, those born after 1980 reverse this change, moving again toward greater nasal coarticulation. This finding adds nasality to the set of phonetic dimensions that are demonstrably susceptible to diachronic change in a speech community. The observation that the degree of nasal coarticulation changes towards increased coarticulation at one time period and decreased coarticulation at a different time period adds to the growing body of evidence that subphonemic variation is not universally determined, suggesting instead that it is learned and encoded. Furthermore, the changes in nasality are independent from an observed frequency effect. These empirical patterns suggest that language-internal factors, such as lexical frequency, are independent from language external factors, such as community-level phonetic change over time.

Variability in vowel production: Exploring interactions among frequency, neighborhood density, predictability, and mention

Multiple factors are known to affect vowel production, including word frequency, neighborhood density, close predictability, and mention. In this study, we explored interactions between the effects of all four of these factors on vowel duration and dispersion in a fully crossed within-subjects design. Participants read a series of short stories that contained target words varying in frequency, neighborhood density, predictability, and mention. Vowel duration and dispersion from the center of vowel space were measured. Results from linear mixed effect modeling revealed the expected effect of neighborhood density on duration: vowels in words with higher neighborhood density were longer. Both frequency and mention had significant expected effects on vowel duration and dispersion: vowels in more frequent words and second mention words were shorter and less peripheral. An interaction between frequency and mention on dispersion was also observed, such that low frequency words underwent second mention reduction to a greater degree than high frequency words. No effects of predictability were observed. These results are only partially consistent with reported findings elsewhere in the literature, suggesting that these effects are fragile and may be substantially affected by methodological choices, including the target words, task, and statistical models.

Song Without Words: Discovering My Deafness Halfway Through Life

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessSong Without Words: Discovering My Deafness Halfway Through LifeJeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., , Roger Peele, M.D., and Nicole Sakla, B.S.Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H., Editor, Roger PeeleSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., and Nicole SaklaSearch for more papers by this author, B.S.Published Online:1 Jan 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.650110AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail by SheaGerald; Boston, Da Capo Press, 2013, 291 pagesAt the age of six, a young boy named Gerald Shea contracted scarlet fever and was left partially deaf as a result. Remarkably, however, for nearly three decades he did not realize he had a substantial hearing handicap. Instead, he thought he had a cognitive disorder that he addressed by testing the “melody” of vowels in words that he would hear until the choice of consonants made sense. These constructed vowel melodies are what Shea referred to as “lyricals.” For example, when Shea heard “Gerry, when you’re in a baa you’ve got to taa to pee,” using lyricals, he eventually translated what he had heard into, “Gerry, when you’re in a box, you’ve got to talk to people.” Unfortunately, conversations would typically carry on before he could make the translation. Despite this substantial handicap, he was among the top students at Andover, Yale, and Columbia Law School and had a successful international practice in law in the United States and Europe that often required him to hear accurately.Within those three decades, he worked 16 hours a day trying to make sense of the world around him. After discovering that he was deaf, he noted that his handicap led to “time lost as a child, a student, a lover”—as a fact, and not with any self-pity.The most imperative lesson to be taken from this autobiography is that the knowledge of being hearing handicapped does not solve or in any way eliminate the problems experienced by the 30 million partially deaf citizens in this country. When Shea finds out what his real handicap is, challenges remain. In addressing these challenges, he meets a psychiatrist, Peter Melanson, who was training to be a brain surgeon and slowly became deaf beginning in his mid-twenties. Dr. Melanson realized his deafness could have lethal consequences in an operating room and switched to the field of psychiatry, which he could successfully practice with mechanical aids. Dr. Melanson suggests that Shea be sensitive to what a life of lyricals can do to Shea’s life if he insists on not recognizing the limitations of his hearing. He ends their only meeting by giving Shea a bear hug.This candid and charming memoir reminds us that our brains are a language acquisition device. Partial deafness can lead to a limited life, or it can lead to a constant search for the meaning of life’s endless mysteries. Shea’s life is defined by the latter.Dr. Peele is with the Department of Psychiatry, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Ms. Sakla is with the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park.The reviewers report no competing interests. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 65Issue 1 January 2014Pages e10-e10 Metrics The reviewers report no competing interests.PDF download History Published online 1 January 2014 Published in print 1 January 2014

The influence of production latencies and phonological neighborhood density on vowel dispersion

This paper reports preliminary results from a study on the influence of planning processes on variability in the acoustic characteristics of vowels. Twelve speakers produced multiple tokens of words varying in phonological neighborhood density (PND). As in previous research, vowels in words with high PND were produced closer to the periphery of the acoustic vowel space than were vowels in low PND words. Response latencies predicted the degree of hyperarticulation in an experimental condition in which these latencies were thought to reflect the extent of coactivation of phonologically similar words, but not in a condition in which this coactivation was presumed to have attenuated.

Phonological representations in children's native and non-native lexicon

This study investigated the phonological representations of vowels in children's native and non-native lexicons. Two experiments were mispronunciation tasks (i.e., a vowel in words was substituted by another vowel from the same language). These were carried out by Dutch-speaking 9–12-year-old children and Dutch-speaking adults, in their native (Experiment 1, Dutch) and non-native (Experiment 2, English) language. A third experiment tested vowel discrimination. In Dutch, both children and adults could accurately detect mispronunciations. In English, adults, and especially children, detected substitutions of native vowels (i.e., vowels that are present in the Dutch inventory) by non-native vowels more easily than changes in the opposite direction. Experiment 3 revealed that children could accurately discriminate most of the vowels. The results indicate that children's L1 categories strongly influenced their perception of English words. However, the data also reveal a hint of the development of L2 phoneme categories.

Phonological neighborhood density and vowel production in children and adults

Previous studies have shown that vowels in words with high phonological neighborhood densities (ND) are produced closer to the periphery of the vowel space than are vowels in low-ND words (Munson & Solomon, 2004; Scarborough, 2010; Wright, 2003). Different explanations for this phenomenon have been proposed. One hypothesis is that they reflect a speaker's attempt to maintain acoustic distinctiveness among similar-sounding words. If this were true, then we might expect that the effect of ND on vowel production would be smaller in children than in adults, given that children have overall smaller-sized lexicons than adults. To evaluate this, we examined the effect of ND on vowel production in children and adults. The productions were taken from the paidologos corpus (Edwards & Beckman, 2008). Preliminary analyses of the productions of 8 high-ND and 8 low-ND words by 10 2-year-olds, 10 5-year-olds and 20 adults have been completed. There are no effects of ND on vowel-space size or vowel duration for either group of children. There were strong, statistically significant effects found the group of adults. These were in the opposite than predicted direction: low-ND words were produced with more-expanded vowel spaces than high-ND words. Analysis of a larger group of participants is ongoing [support: NIDCD 02932.]