Articulatory and acoustic studies have shown that the effects of anticipatory coarticulation may extend across several segments in an utterance. But previous perceptual studies suggest that only the information carried by immediately adjacent segments is used in perception. To show that perception is not so limited, we persuaded ten talkers each to produce 12 sentences (e.g., ’’I say poozee’’) of the form ’’I say /C V1 z V2/’’ in which C was /p, t, k/, V1 was /u, F/, and V2 was /i,◊/. Each /i,◊/ sentence pair was cross spliced by exchanging the final syllable /z V2/ so that coarticulatory information prior to the crosspoint was inappropriate for the final vowel V2 in crossed sentences. Recognition time (RT) for V2 in crossed and intact (as spoken) sentences was obtained from practiced listeners. The results were slower RT in crossed sentences, and amount of interference depended on both V1 and C context. Another experiment varied the location of crosspoints across /C V1/ and found that RT interference increased directly with amount and proximity to target of inappropriate precross acoustics. LPC analysis of the experimental sentences showed pretarget variations in F2 frequency which were jointly dependent on identity of C, V1, and V2. Pretarget F2 variations and C and V1 identity jointly predicted amount of RT interference in crossed sentences. Finally, experiments with pretarget F2 variations in synthetic speech repeated and extended the results with real speech. These studies lead to the conclusion that the perceptual significance of coarticulation is not limited to effects on immediately adjacent segments. Listeners appear to be sensitive to many acoustic effects of the mutual influence among the segments in a sequence.

The work published in Phonology and Phonetic Evidence presents an integrated phonetics-phonology approach in what has become an established field, laboratory phonology. This 1995 volume is divided into three sections. Part I deals with the status and role of features in phonological representations; Part II, on prosody, contains, amongst others, two papers which present for the first time detailed acoustic and perceptual evidence on the rhythm rule; and Part III, on articulatory organisation, includes several papers which from different perspectives test hypotheses derived from articulatory phonology, thereby testifying to the great influence this theory has exerted in recent years. This, the fourth in the series of Papers in Laboratory Phonology, will be welcomed by all those interested in phonetics, phonology and their interface.

While efforts to document endangered languages have steadily increased, the phonetic analysis of endangered language data remains a challenge. The transcription of large documentation corpora is, by itself, a tremendous feat. Yet, the process of segmentation remains a bottleneck for research with data of this kind. This paper examines whether a speech processing tool, forced alignment, can facilitate the segmentation task for small data sets, even when the target language differs from the training language. The authors also examined whether a phone set with contextualization outperforms a more general one. The accuracy of two forced aligners trained on English (hmalign and p2fa) was assessed using corpus data from Yoloxóchitl Mixtec. Overall, agreement performance was relatively good, with accuracy at 70.9% within 30 ms for hmalign and 65.7% within 30 ms for p2fa. Segmental and tonal categories influenced accuracy as well. For instance, additional stop allophones in hmalign's phone set aided alignment accuracy. Agreement differences between aligners also corresponded closely with the types of data on which the aligners were trained. Overall, using existing alignment systems was found to have potential for making phonetic analysis of small corpora more efficient, with more allophonic phone sets providing better agreement than general ones.

Text-to-speech options on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices are limited. Often, several individuals in a group setting use the same synthetic voice. This lack of customization may limit technology adoption and social integration. This paper describes our efforts to generate personalized synthesis for users with profoundly limited speech motor control. Existing voice banking and voice conversion techniques rely on recordings of clearly articulated speech from the target talker, which cannot be obtained from this population. Our VocaliD approach extracts prosodic properties from the target talker's source function and applies these features to a surrogate talker's database, generating a synthetic voice with the vocal identity of the target talker and the clarity of the surrogate talker. Promising intelligibility results suggest areas of further development for improved personalization.