One of a regular series on the status and progress of research into the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report consists of 17 papers dealing with the following topics: (1) vagueness and fictions as cornerstones of a theory of perceiving and acting--a commentary on D.O. Walter; (2) the…

This report covers research conducted between July 1972 and March 1973. Experiments were conducted on the automatic detection of constituent boundaries and location of stressed syllables by analysis of fundamental frequency and energy contours, for recordings of six talkers reading the Rainbow Script, two talkers reading a paragraph composed of…

This paper examines the validity of the concept of linguistic units in a theory of speech production. Substantiating data are drawn from the study of the speech production process itself. Secondarily, an attempt is made to reconcile the postulation of linguistic units in speech production theory with their apparent absence in the speech signal.…

This booklet, part of a course for teaching English to adult Francophones, is designed to assist the student in learning to produce the "th" sound in English. The voiceless and voiced "th" sounds are described, articulation techniques for both sounds are presented, and listening discrimination and production exercises are provided. A special…

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the sounds, ?, h, y, and w function as a natural class by investigating the following languages that have a metathesis rule affecting these sounds: Yagua, Zoque, classical Greek, Mandaic, Akkadian, Hanunoo, Tubatulabal, Twana, and Hungarian. The paper is divided into four parts. Section 1 briefly…

The comprehensibility of materials compressed and then expanded by means of an electromechanical process was tested with 280 Army inductees divided into groups of high and low mental aptitude. Three short listening selections relating to military activities were subjected to compression and compression-expansion to produce seven versions. Data…

This study investigated the perception of place and secondary articulation contrasts in different syllable positions by Russian and Japanese listeners. The consonants involved in the study were the Russian plain (velarized) and palatalized labial and coronal voiceless stops in syllable-initial and syllable-final positions at word boundaries. The…

This study tested the issue of whether extended length of residence (LOR) in adulthood can provide sufficient input to overcome age effects. The study replicates Flege, Takagi, and Mann (1995), which found that 10 out of 12 Japanese learners of English with extensive residence (12 years or more) produced liquids as accurately as native speakers of…

The purpose of the research was to develop an articulation test for Spanish-speakers and to field-test the instrument in both a monolingual Spanish-speaking environment and a bilingual Spanish/English environment. Such a test is needed because there has been little available to enable the diagnostician, whose clientele includes Spanish-speakers,…

This report describes in two volumes the proceedings of a conference on the perception of language held at the University of Pittsburgh in January, 1968. The objectives of the conference, to present the particular research interests of the participants and to attempt to find points of concurrence in thinking through discussion of the conference…

This study, the fifth in the series "Studies in the Phonology of Asian Languages," aims to describe those acoustic features involved in the distinction of Korean stop consonants, using the sound spectrograph and pitch extractor as research tools. The report specifically deals with voice onset time associated with weak and strong stops and the…

Lip and jaw movements were studied longitudinally in 19-month-old children as they acquired the voicing contrast for /p/ and /b/. A movement tracking system obtained lip and jaw kinematics as participants produced the target utterances /papa/ and /baba/. Laryngeal adjustments were also tracked through acoustically recorded voice onset time (VOT)…

Automatic speech recognition is expected to be more successful when syntactically-related information is incorporated into early stages of recognition. Phonemic decisions, in particular, are expected to be more accurate and less ambiguous when contextual information is considered. A computer program detected about 90% of all boundaries between…

This collection on speech research presents a number of reports of experiments conducted on neurological, physiological, and phonological questions, using electronic equipment for analysis. The neurological experiments cover auditory and phonetic processes in speech perception, auditory storage, ear asymmetry in dichotic listening, auditory…

Beginning chapters of this volume define language and describe the sound, stress, and intonation systems of English. The body of the text explores extensively morphology, phonetics, phonemics, and the process of communication. Individual chapters detail such topics as morphemes, syntactic devices, grammatical systems, phonemic problems in language…