Aleese Block

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Linguistics

Danish, like closely related Swedish and Norwegian, has descended from Old Norse (Haugen 1976). While the three contemporary languages are variably mutually intelligible, Danish has phonologically diverged from the other Scandinavian languages (Gooskens 2006). This is caused by extensive consonant lenition and vowel reduction within Danish (Basbøll...

The current study explores whether the top-down influence of speaker age guise influences patterns of compensation for coarticulation. /u/-fronting variation in California is linked to both phonetic and social factors: /u/ in alveolar contexts is fronter than in bilabial contexts and /u/-fronting is more advanced in younger speakers. We investigate...

This study investigates the perception of coarticulatory vowel nasality generated using different text-to-speech (TTS) methods in American English. Experiment 1 compared concatenative and neural TTS using a 4IAX task, where listeners discriminated between a word pair containing either both oral or nasalized vowels and a word pair containing one ora...

The current study explores whether perception of coarticulatory vowel nasalization differs by speaker age (adult vs. child) and type of voice (naturally produced vs. synthetic speech). Listeners completed a 4IAX discrimination task between pairs containing acoustically identical (both nasal or oral) vowels and acoustically distinct (one oral, one n...

The decision to include or exclude phonemes in the description of a language is not always straightforward; presentations of the phoneme inventory of Modern Standard German (MSG) often include a discussion of why /ɛ:/ is problematic as a phoneme. This study describes the acoustic realization of /ɛ:/ in comparison to /e:/ in spoken German, specifica...