Using Formants to Compare Short and Long Vowels in Modern Standard Arabic

This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant (CVVC). Even though there has been a dispute on the precise number of Arabic vowels that exist between language studies, this study used the opinion that the Arabic language has three vowels;the elongation of each vowel gave the other three because this is the opinion of classical Arabic linguists which is the source of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Studies said that the first and second formant values (F1, F2) can represent the vowels. In this study, the formants were measured using LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), verifying the measurement to see if the measured follows the pattern of formants measurements of the other studies, and the formants were used to investigate the relationship between short and long vowels. Furthermore, the study figured out if the dialect of speakers can affect the values of formants, even if the spoken language is MSA, some statistical measurements were calculated to evaluate the relationship.

Recognition of vertical vowel graphemes of Korean characters based on combination of vowel graphemes

Korean characters consist of 2 dimensional distributed consonantal and vowel graphemes. The purpose of reducing the 2 dimensional characteristics of Korean characters to linear arrangements at early stage of character recognition is to decrease the complexity of following recognition task. By defining the identification codes for the vowel graphemes of Korean characters, the rules for combination of vowel graphemes are established, and a recognition algorithm based on the rules for combination of vowel graphemes, is therefore proposed for vertical vowel graphemes. The algorithm has been proved feasilbe through demonstrating simulations.

A Useful System in Learning and Teaching English Pronunciation——IPA Cardinal Vowels System

The paper introduces the cardinal vowels system invented by the famous English phonetician Daniel Jones.This system enables a teacher to describe to his students a foreign vowel by comparing it with the nearest vowel in his mother tongue,which makes the learning of a foreign sound much easier to his students.Two cases of teaching Chinese students English vowels are taken as an example to illustrate the point.IPA cardinal vowel system is of use in terms of teaching and learning English.Two suggestions are put forward in the end.

On the Vowel Changes of English Language in History

The Vowel changes of English are more dramatic and complicated in every period of English development. Especially theGreat Vowel Shift from Middle English to Modern English influenced the whole English phonetic system. This paper examines thevowel changes in each period of English development and aims at concluding the rules of the language change and development.

The Emotional Approach of Foreign Vowel Acquisition Within the Example of British English Vowels

The aim of the article is to present results of research that was performed with 97 Polish students of the second and third year of English Philology. The purpose of the research is to examine how conscious manipulation of facial expressions aids acquisition of foreign vowels by learners, regardless of their native language and the culture they have been brought up in. Taking advantage of achievements derived from such disciplines as psychology of emotions and phonetics depicted as a physical process, an attempt is made to find a tool that improves teaching/learning of foreign vowels, that is to say, an effort is put in search of a useful method to make the phonetic process faster and more accurate. Teachers of English are encouraged to put the method, which is described in detail in the paper, into practice with their own mother languages and to share opinions about the method with colleagues. Similarly, it is believed that it can be applied to courses of other languages than just English. Teachers of those languages are encouraged to try to use it, too.

Perception of English Tense and Lax Vowel Contrasts in Chinese Learners of English

This paper aims at examining the perception of English tense and lax vowel contrasts by testing an identification task of CVC syllables with different manipulated durations in Chinese learners of English.This can provide some empirical evidence for English as a second language teachers in teaching second language pronunciation.

Acoustic Analysis of EkeGusii Vowel System

This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four children(two boys and two girls all 8 years old)equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii(EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects).In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration,the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s(1971)algorithm.Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels:(a)acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs.F1 or quadrilateral,and(b)spatial features of high,low,front and back.These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender,age and dialect.The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants,and have the highest frequencies for all formants,followed by adult females and then adult males.Furthermore,acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender,age,and dialect.A vowel pattern,replicated by all informants,is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age.This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of/i eɛaɔo u/with a length contrast.

Preliminary Studies on Great Vowel Shift

The great gowel ghift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the 15th to 18th centuries. Based on the history and theory of great vowel shift, the thesis makes an investigation on the principle, exceptions and effect of Great Vowel Shift.

Payload Capacity Scheme for Quran Text Watermarking Based on Vowels with Kashida

The most sensitive Arabic text available online is the digital Holy Quran.This sacred Islamic religious book is recited by all Muslims worldwide including non-Arabs as part of their worship needs.Thus,it should be protected from any kind of tampering to keep its invaluable meaning intact.Different characteristics of Arabic letters like the vowels(),Kashida(extended letters),and other symbols in the Holy Quran must be secured from alterations.The cover text of the Quran and its watermarked text are different due to the low values of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR)and Embedding Ratio(ER).A watermarking technique with enhanced attributes must,therefore,be designed for the Quran’s text using Arabic vowels with kashida.The gap addressed by this paper is to improve the security of Arabic text in the Holy Quran by using vowels with kashida.The purpose of this paper is to enhance the Quran text watermarking scheme based on a reversing technique.The methodology consists of four phases:The first phase is a pre-processing followed by the second phase-the embedding process phase—which will hide the data after the vowels.That is,if the secret bit is“1”,then the kashida is inserted;however,the kashida is not inserted if the bit is“0”.The third phase is the extraction process and the last phase is to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by using PSNR(for the imperceptibility)and ER(for the capacity).The experimental results show that the proposed method of imperceptibility insertion is also optimized with the help of a reversing algorithm.The proposed strategy obtains a 90.5%capacity.Furthermore,the proposed algorithm attained 66.1%which is referred to as imperceptibility.

Using Formants to Extract Short Vowels from Arabic Words with (Consonant Vowel)³Structure

Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English language in characteristics such as the number of vowels. English has more than 24 vowels that are close to each other in pronunciation. The Arabic language only has three short vowels that are far from each other in utter and measurement, by elongating those short vowels, long vowels arose. Researchers said that the vowels could be recognized using formants. The formants’ measurements of Arabic vowels are far from each other too, so it is possible to recognize them so that Arabic Speech recognition can give more accurate results. The paper applies this idea to the corpus Phonemes of Arabic. It uses the Euclidian distance method to measure the distances between formant values to recognize Arabic from words with a CV3 structure, the Linear Predictive Coding method and MATLAB to develop the programs that will extract the formants and calculate the means of the short vowels by using the corpus to identify the short vowels within words in the corpus. The results showed that if highly qualified readers were chosen to read the Arabic text, then higher rates of recognition of the short vowels involved in words will be achieved. This paper revealed that some of the characteristics of a language can be utilized for vowel recognition or to enhance the existing methods for speech recognition.

Differences of Vowel Pronunciation in China English and American English： A Case Study of [i] and [I]

This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sentences and their voices were recorded. A software program is used to analyze their voices. In spectrograms generated by Praat, the connection between formant values and articulation features is used to investigate how native speakers pronounce these two vowels and what the differences are between native speakers and Chinese speakers. Through this investigation, it is discovered that Chinese speakers have lower tongue position in [i] and their tongues are more forward in [I], thus making it hard to differentiate these two vowels. Moreover, the length of [i] is much shorter than those in American pronunciation, suggesting that Chinese speakers differentiate [i] and [I] largely by length. However, the comparison of Chinese speakers and native speakers proved otherwise.

IPA Cardinal Vowels and the English Pronunciation Teaching in China

In pronunciation teaching, learners may have difficulty when there is a ＂gap＂ in the phonemic system between L1 （the first or native language） and L2 （the second or foreign language）. In such a case, they tend to use their native language sounds in speaking the foreign language. Since some Chinese and English vowel sounds are easy to be confused, applying IPA cardinal vowels in the teaching of English pronunciation will help Chinese learners identify the difference between an English vowel sound and a Chinese vowel sound and thus enables them to make intelligible English speech sounds.

Presentation of Consonants,Vowels and Stresses in English Medical Terminology

This paper studies the special pronunciation rules of consonants.vowels and stresses in English medical terms from the phonetic and etiologic perspectives,which may provide help for medical students in studying medical English.

Heart Rate Extraction from Vowel Speech Signals

This paper presents a novel non-contact heart rate extraction method from vowel speech signals. The proposed method is based on modeling the relationship between speech production of vowel speech signals and heart activities for humans where it is observed that the moment of heart beat causes a short increment （evolution） of vowel speech formants. The short-time Fourier transform （STFT） is used to detect the formant maximum peaks so as to accurately estimate the heart rate. Compared with traditional contact pulse oximeter, the average accuracy of the proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method exceeds 95%. The proposed non-contact heart rate extraction method is expected to play an important role in modern medical applications.

Fast global kernel fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for consonant/vowel segmentation of speech signal

We propose a novel clustering algorithm using fast global kernel fuzzy c-means-F(FGKFCM-F), where F refers to kernelized feature space. This algorithm proceeds in an incremental way to derive the near-optimal solution by solving all intermediate problems using kernel-based fuzzy c-means-F(KFCM-F) as a local search procedure. Due to the incremental nature and the nonlinear properties inherited from KFCM-F, this algorithm overcomes the two shortcomings of fuzzy c-means(FCM): sen- sitivity to initialization and inability to use nonlinear separable data. An accelerating scheme is developed to reduce the compu-tational complexity without significantly affecting the solution quality. Experiments are carried out to test the proposed algorithm on a nonlinear artificial dataset and a real-world dataset of speech signals for consonant/vowel segmentation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving clustering performance on both types of datasets.

Excitation patterns and phonetic identities of Chinese vowels

After entering the peripheral auditory system, a sound undergoes many significant changes. The excitation pattern describes these changes psychoacoustically as inner expression. This study investigates the relations between excitation patterns and their phonetic qualities for Chinese steady-state vowels. First, the peak positions of the envelope of excitation patterns were measured on a database. The results demonstrated that each Chinese vowel has its own special position for the representative peak of the excitation pattern. Second, to examine the sufficiency of these results, a series of experiments that consisted of identification and evaluation tasks were conducted, in which spectral components of natural isolated vowels were manipulated to create certain excitation patterns. Subjects＇ responses of these stimuli show that the position of the representative peak of the excitation pattern of a vowel plays a crucial role on its phonetic identity. The results suggest that the phonetic identity of vowels is determined by the position of the representative peak of the excitation pattern evoked by it, and other peaks, if any, do not have phonetic meaning. Additionally, several phenomena about speech perception are discussed on the basis of this study.

ACOUSTIC AND ARTICULATORY ANALYSIS ON CHINESE AND JAPANESE VOWELS IN EMOTIONAL SPEECH

This research investigated the articulatory and acoustic cues of the emotional vowels from production/coding perspectives Chinese and Japanese emotional speech and EMA data were recorded.The acoustic and articulatory spaces of isolated vowels across different emotions were analyzed to understand the coding scheme in cross-cultural emotion production.The results suggest that,on the one hand,those two languages share some common features:(1) Significant differences of the acoustic space exist across emotions;(2) 'Sad' and 'Angry' vowels raise tongue position higher than other emotions;(3)The lip’s protrusion feature is shared by both 'Angry' and 'Sad' emotions,except[a]or[A].We suggested that the exception is caused by the increase of the mouth opening.The mouth opening and the degree of lip protrusion are a pair of complementary features.On the other hand,differences also exist between those two languages;(l)In Chinese,the acoustic space moves downwards with the increasing of emotion intensity;in Japanese,however, 'Angry' is characterized by a horizontally compressed acoustic space,and 'Sad' by a vertically compressed acoustic space.(2)In Chinese,emotional factors only cause tongue raising movement;in Japanese,emotional factors cause both tongue raising and significant tongue retraction,which can be enhanced by 'Angry' and 'Sad' emotions.

An acoustic analysis of vowels in checked syllables in Chinese

Vowels in checked syllables are almost short and abrupt in Chinese Mandarin dialects. This paper proposed a parametric statistical modeling for the analysis of these vowels.The parameters were described empirically with the method of probability distribution. The effects of the multiparameter classifications were estimated by the binary and multinomial logistic models, and the method of support vector machine was adopted to carry out the pattern recognition of the classifications. The results show that the parameters of duration, DCT_（1-3）are significant to the external classification, and the parameters of DCT_（0-3） have significant main effects on the internal classification. The automatic testing shows that the hit rate of the external pattern recognition is only 43.6% but the rate is 96.1% of the internal. It indicates that the abrupt feature should be additive rather than distinctive.

Vowel Reduction in Japanese

This paper reports the result that vowel reduction occurs in Japanese and vowel reduction is the part of the language universality.Compared with English,the effect of the vowel reduction in Japanese is relatively weak might because of the absence of stress in Japanese.Since spectral vowel reduction occurs in Japanese,various types of researches would be possible.

VOWEL DISPERSION AND VARIABILITY—DATA FROM THREE CHINESE DIALECTS

The study^1 investigates dispersion and variability of the vowels of three Chinese dialects,namely Yongding,Cantonese,and Wenling with the three-,seven-,and eleven-vowel systems,respectively.Measurements of formant frequencies were obtained through spectral analysis of speech data from ten male and ten female speakers of each dialect Results show that a larger vowel inventory correlates a more expanded acoustical vowel space for the three Chinese dialects,which supports the prediction of the vowel dispersion theory that the larger the vowel inventory is,the more expanded vowel space will be.However,the difference in vowel space is not linearly related to the difference in vowel inventory size.Furthermore,the vowel dispersion theory’s prediction that variability in vowel formant frequencies is inversely related to vowel inventory size is not supported by the vowel formant data from the three Chinese dialects.