Speaking Rate, Oro-Laryngeal Timing, and Place of Articulation Effects on Burst Amplitude: Evidence From English and Tamil.

The relationship between speaking rate and burst amplitude was investigated in plosives with differing oro-laryngeal timing: long-lag voice-onset time (VOT) (North American English) and short-lag VOT (Indian Tamil). Burst amplitude (reflecting both intraoral pressure and flow geometry of the oral channel) was hypothesized to decrease in pre-vocalic plosive syllables with the increase in speaking rate, which imposes temporal constraints on both intraoral pressure buildup behind the oral occlusion and respiratory air flow. The results showed that decreased vowel duration (which is associated with increased speaking rate) led to decreased burst amplitude in both short- and long-lag plosives.

Words Get in the Way: Linguistic Effects on Talker Discrimination.

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not.

Speech rate and pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech: Longitudinal and cross-linguistic observations.

The speech rate and pitch (F0) characteristics of naturalistic, longitudinally recorded infant- and adult-directed speech are reported for three, genetically diverse languages. Previous research has suggested that the prosodic characteristics of infant-directed speech are slowed speech rate, raised mean pitch, and expanded pitch range relative to adult-directed speech. Sixteen mothers (5 Sri Lankan Tamil, 5 Tagalog, 6 Korean) were recorded in their homes during natural interactions with their young infants, and adults, over the course of 12 months beginning when the infant was 4 months old.

The interaction between acoustic salience and language experience in developmental speech perception: evidence from nasal place discrimination.

Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10-12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to the influence of native language experience, acoustic salience also affects the perceptual reorganization that takes place in infancy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, two nasal place distinctions that differ in relative acoustic salience, acoustically robust labial-alveolar [ma]-[na] and acoustically less salient alveolar-velar [na]-[ enga], were presented to infants in a cross-language design.