Background: Previous research has found that high-frequency energy of speech signals decreased while wearing face masks. However, no study has examined the specific spectral characteristics of fricative consonants and vowels and the perception of clarity of speech in mask wearing. Aims: To investigate acoustic-phonetic characteristics of fricative…

Background: Intelligibility measurement is influenced by the characteristics of a speaker, listener and contextual factors. This study addresses the clinical problem of measuring speech intelligibility in children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in real-world conditions. Aims: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of electrolaryngeal (EL) speech among untrained speakers to aid in its effective introduction and to identify syllables and words that are easy or difficult to pronounce. Method: A total of 21 healthy individuals who had never used an EL were included. The participants were…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

Purpose: This study examined the acoustic properties of Taiwanese (Southern Min) lexical tones produced in esophageal speech (ES) and pneumatic artificial laryngeal speech (PAL), including onset fundamental frequency (F0), slope of F0 contour, duration, and amplitude (intensity) of the vowel portion of syllables carrying seven Taiwanese tones.…

The expansion of the English language produced by non-native speakers has, in recent decades, been discussed by applied linguists from various theoretical perspectives. The discussion has highlighted evidence showing that the multiplicity and diversity of English uses have given rise to an acceleration in the rate of inter-variety contacts where…

The present study investigated Korean-accented English (KoE) intelligibility and conducted experiments in Korea, Japan, and the USA to test the benefits of listener's familiarity and identify the key phonological features of KoE. In the experiments, the participants were asked to transcribe the target (KoE) of 100 English statements each…

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners…

This study investigated the overall intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking Boothroyd's (1985) forced-choice phonetic contrast material designed for measurement of speech intelligibility. Twelve…