Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel fundamental frequency in Dutch.

It has been known for a long time and a wide variety of languages that vowel fundamental frequency (F0) following voiceless obstruents tends to be significantly higher than F0 following voiced obstruents. There has been a long-standing debate about the cause of this phenomenon. Some evidence in previous work is more compatible with an articulatory account of this effect, while others support the auditory enhancement account.

The role of prosody in interpreting causality in English discourse.

Previous studies have well established that certain causal connectives encode information about the semantic-pragmatic distinction between different types of causal relations such as CAUSE-CONSEQUENCE versus CLAIM-ARGUMENT relations. These "specialized" causal connectives assist listeners in discerning different types of causality. Additionally, research has demonstrated that utterances expressing CLAIM-ARGUMENT relations exhibit distinct prosodic characteristics compared to utterances expressing CAUSE-CONSEQUENCE relations.

Long-term within-speaker consistency of filled pauses in native and non-native speech.

Filled pauses are widely considered as a relatively consistent feature of an individual's speech. However, acoustic consistency has only been observed within single-session recordings. By comparing filled pauses in two recordings made >2.

Phonetic similarity of /s/ in native and second language: Individual differences in learning curves.

Second language learners may merge similar sounds from their native (L1) and second (L2) languages into a single phonetic category, neutralizing subphonemic differences in these similar sounds. This study investigates whether Dutch speakers produce phonetically distinct variants of /s/ in their L1 Dutch and L2 English, and whether and how this phonetic categorization develops over time. Target /s/ sounds in matching words in L1 and L2 were compared in their centre of spectral gravity.

Acoustic correlates of vowel intelligibility in clear and conversational speech for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners.

The present investigation carried out acoustic analyses of vowels in clear and conversational speech produced by 41 talkers. Mixed-effects models were then deployed to examine relationships among acoustic and perceptual data for these vowels. Acoustic data include vowel duration, steady-state formant frequencies, and two measures of dynamic formant movement.