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.

Longitudinal trends in speech tempo: the case of Queen Beatrix.

Older talkers speak slower than young ones, but speech tempo has increased in the last decades. Have present-day older talkers slowed down with age or have they sped up with their community? This study investigates longitudinal patterns in articulation rate in formal speeches presented annually by Queen Beatrix between her ages 42 and 74. Her tempo decreased first and then increased in the last decade.

Objective acoustic-phonetic speech analysis in patients treated for oral or oropharyngeal cancer.

Objective: Speech impairment often occurs in patients after treatment for head and neck cancer. New treatment modalities such as surgical reconstruction or (chemo)radiation techniques aim at sparing anatomical structures that are correlated with speech and swallowing. In randomized trials investigating efficacy of various treatment modalities or speech rehabilitation, objective speech analysis techniques may add to improve speech outcome assessment.

Prosodic boundaries in alaryngeal speech.

Alaryngeal speakers (speakers in whom the larynx has been removed) have inconsistent control over acoustic parameters such as F(0) and duration. This study investigated whether proficient tracheoesophageal and oesophageal speakers consistently convey phrase boundaries. It was further investigated if these alaryngeal speakers used the same hierarchy of acoustic boundary cues that is found in normal speakers.

Multilevel modeling of between-speaker and within-speaker variation in spontaneous speech tempo.

Speech tempo (articulation rate) varies both between and within speakers. The present study investigates several factors affecting tempo in a corpus of spoken Dutch, consisting of interviews with 160 high-school teachers. Speech tempo was observed for each phrase separately, and analyzed by means of multilevel modeling of the speaker's sex, age, country, and dialect region (between speakers) and length, sequential position of phrase, and autocorrelated tempo (within speakers).

Effects of timing regularity and metrical expectancy on spoken-word perception.

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with highly regular inter-stress timing.

"Pitch" accent in alaryngeal speech.

Highly proficient alaryngeal speakers are known to convey prosody successfully. The present study investigated whether alaryngeal speakers not selected on grounds of proficiency were able to convey pitch accent (a pitch accent is realized on the word that is in focus, cf. Bolinger, 1958).

Metrical segmentation in Dutch: vowel quality or stress?

Previous experiments using a word-spotting task suggest that English listeners use metrically strong syllables to segment continuous speech into discrete words (Cutler & Norris, 1988). The present study is concerned with this metrical segmentation strategy in Dutch. Although Dutch and English share general metrical properties, they differ in ways that may affect segmentation.

Segment durations and accent as cues to word segmentation in Dutch.

This paper investigates the relative contributions of accentuation and of durational word boundary cues to listeners' perceived word segmentation in Dutch. A listening experiment is reported, in which 36 two-word phrases with an ambiguous word boundary were used as stimuli. Four groups of 20 subjects each had to make a forced binary choice between the two contrastive boundary positions.