This thesis explores the coarticulatory effects of English /l/ and /r/, examining their articulatory basis, acoustic manifestation and perceptual relevance. It demonstrates that there are perceptually relevant coarticulatory differences associated with the distinction between /l/ and /r/. Two perceptual experiments, an articulatory experiment and a modelling study were conducted. Both perceptual experiments used a modified gating technique. The first experiment demonstrates that the coarticulatory effects of /l/ and /r/ on surrounding vowels and consonants can sometimes be used by listeners to identify an HI or /r/ which has been deleted and replaced by noise. The second perceptual experiment shows that the cues for an /r/ are more perceptually salient than those for an /l/. The articulatory experiment used simultaneous electromagnetic articulography, electropalatography and acoustic recordings to investigate the coarticulatory effects of /l/ and /r/. In /r/ contexts, relative to /l/ contexts, raising and retraction of the tongue, lip rounding and lowering of F₃ were found, up to two syllables preceding and following the /r/. The extent of this coarticulatory effect is far greater than commonly acknowledged in the coarticulation literature. Phonetic and phonological theories fail to predict or account for effects of this extent. The theory that coarticulation can be modelled as overlap of articulatory gestures was tested in a modelling study. A subset of the articulatory data was modelled numerically using dynamical descriptions of articulatory gestures from an approach developed at Haskins Laboratories. The modelling showed that longdistance coarticulatory effects could not be adequately accounted for by gestural overlap alone. Feature-spreading models, such as Keating's window model of coarticulation, are also unable to account for these effects adequately. The results of this thesis pose a challenge to current phonetic and phonological theory, as they show that coarticulatory effects have greater extent than commonly recognised.

Extensive reviews of phonetic and phonological investigations into sex-related differences reveal a mottled history. The investigations suffer from methodological and theoretical deficits: the most serious being the misrepresentation of the interaction between variables, a lack of homogeneous data and its misinterpretation, and the widespread neglect of women's speech. Existing phonetic databases are shown to be inadequate and poorly-controlled, admitting too many unwanted variables. A very tightly-controlled database, constructed for this research, contains data for eighty female and male speakers of two accents of British English. This contribution is regarded as important per se. Digital acoustic analysis of the data permits quantification of the phonetic divergence shown by the sexes in British English. Previous attempts to normalize the acoustic effects of speaker-sex on vowels have been largely unsuccessful. Here, the application of an innovative auditory normalization procedure reflects how perceptual normalization may be achieved. It further demonstrates that male/female phonetic differences remain after normalisation, which cannot be accounted for by anatomy, but are accountable by social-role conditioning (i.e. learned). These differences are statistically significant. Speaker-sex and gender are thus shown to interact at the phonetic level. Extending this technique to five other languages/dialects corroborates the central hypothesis that the degree to which the sexes diverge phonetically will vary from speech-community to speech-community. Exploration of the possibility that contoids will reveal similar systematicity shows this to be unlikely across languages. The examination of suprasegmental sex-associated differences, however, merits further pursuit. Implications of these experimental findings are discussed for 'inter alia' speech technology, language-planning and medical aids. Using sex-linked differential voice quality as a springboard, it is suggested that sex-appropriate norms are required in speech pathology. The need for socio- phonetics to be recognized as an important new discipline is thus underlined.

No description available.

Measurements of jitter and shimmer are frequently employed to quantify laryngeal control and stability during voice production in patients(1-3). Accurate estimates of jitter and shimmer may be obtained from acoustic recordings of sustained vowels produced by patients using computer software implementing algorithms for their extraction (e.g. Praat(4) or MDVP(5)). The jitter and shimmer algorithms do not, in themselves, exclude non-stable productions and are influenced by the inclusion of silence in the analysed intervals. As a consequence, reliable measurements of jitter and shimmer are made by manually opening each sound file and selecting an interval for the computations.  The current paper proposes an alternative approach to afford a more efficient estimation of jitter and shimmer across a large set of sustained vowel recordings. Using information readily available in the acoustic signal and a combination of algorithms already available within the Praat program, a reliable method for automatic processing of only the sustained vowel in each recording of a large corpus is outlined. The method further affords the acquisition of multiple, repeatable, measurements of jitter and shimmer for sub-intervals of the vowel’s duration (applying more than one algorithm), which additionally provides information concerning the reliability of the jitter or shimmer estimates for a specific vowel  production. Comparisons with manually obtained measurements are made for the purpose of validation of the segmentation method. References 1. Gamboa J, Jiménez-Jiménez FJ, Nieto A, Montojo J, Ortí-Pareja M, Molina JA, et al. Acoustic voice analysis in patients with Parkinson's disease treated with dopaminergic drugs. Journal of Voice. 1997;11(3):314–320.  2. Kent RD, Kim Y-J. Toward an acoustic typology of motor speech disorders. Clin Linguist Phon. 2003;17(6):427–445.  3. Figueiredo ML, de Carvalho APM, Patriani FFA, Suzana BM, Ballalai FH. Acoustic voice assessment in Parkinson's disease patients submitted to posteroventral pallidotomy. Arq. Neuro-Psiquiatr. 2005;63(1):14–19.  4. Boersma P, Weenink D. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]  5. Kay Elemetrics. Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP) [Computer program] / <p>Presented at the 14th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association</p> / En kontrastiv och longitudinell studie gällande effekten av djup hjärnstimulering på Parkinsons-patienters artikulatoriska förmåga. / Intonation and rhythm in speech of patients with Parkinson ́s disease

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1988. / Includes appendixes. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-87).

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2001. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available online.

Thesis (B.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2003. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 30, 2003." Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-31) Also available in print.