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One of the dysarthria features is inaccurate articulation of consonants and vowels, which is the main cause of speech unintelligibility. However, it is not clear what acoustic measures are more related to speech intelligibility in dysarthria. On the other hand, the number of vowels, their articulation and acoustic characteristics are various in different languages. As far as we know, no study investigated vowels articulation in developmental dysarthria in Persian, so there is not enough information about movement details which make their inaccuracies articulation. Hence, the present study aimed to investigate some acoustic measures including vowel formants, vowel space area (VSA), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and vowel articulation index (VAI) and aim to study their correlation with speech intelligibility in Persian speaking children with dysarthria due to spastic cerebral palsy. In this cross-sectional study, 11 children with dysarthria aged 3-9 years and their healthy matched peers were selected through convenience sampling. For each of six Persian vowels, two monosyllable words were acoustically analyzed using PRAAT software. To determine intelligibility of words and vowels, the percentage of correct detected ones was calculated. Results showed a significant difference between the two groups in the third formant of the vowels /a/ and /u/ and the second formant of the vowel /o/. The vowel space area and intelligibility were significantly reduced in dysarthria. VAS was more correlated with intelligibility and is a good acoustic measurement to assess speech intelligibility in dysarthria. However all three studied acoustic indices had moderate significant correlation with intelligibility.

 The current research delves into phonological processes in the Sanandaji dialect of Sorani Kurdish within the framework of prosodic phonology. Prosodic phonology, a prominent approach in this field, offers a practical method for defining the scope of each phonological rule through seven prosodic constituents. This approach emphasizes the interaction between grammar and phonology. By examining specific phonological rules, the paper aims to provide evidence for each prosodic constituent in the Sanandaji dialect of Kurdish. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that the application of phonological rules in this language is heavily influenced by syntactic content and the lexical category of the word. Additionally, it highlights that the application of the rule varies in homonymous words with different lexical categories.

Using forensic analysis, this study attempted to investigate the influence of the Persian language on the quality of Khoramabadi Luri vowels. This research tried to find the answer to whether Persian can affect the acoustic features of Khoramabadi vowels or not. To do so, data from 20 Khoramabadi Lur participants (10 males, 10 females) were recorded; the first group of whom lived in Khoramabad and the second group lived in Tehran. 54 sentences including the selected words were read by participants. The total number of phonetic sample tokens analyzed was 3240, including /ɑ, y, ø, o, u, ə, a, e, ʏ, ɪ, i/ vowels. Phonetic samples were analyzed phonetically and statistically. The acoustic parameters, fundamental frequency, and the first formant frequency to the fifth formant frequency were chosen. Data analysis showed that fundamental frequency, fifth formant frequency, third formant frequency, and by a wide margin second formant frequency had the highest capacity to distinguish Luri samples articulated by male speakers who lived in Tehran and Khoramabad. For female speakers, only fundamental frequency and by a wide margin, the fifth formant frequency of Khoramabadi Luri had this capacity. As a result, fundamental frequency and higher formant frequencies had the highest capacity to distinguish the speakers.

The present study intends to investigate a set of acoustic parameters extracted from the intonation pattern of Kashani and Tehrani accents based on the acoustic approach and in the framework of Accent Forensic Compariton using the Tyler the tilt model, in order to Introduce the most appropriate acoustic parameters that differentiate Imitative Tehrani (a speech in which Kashani's speaker tries to speak as close to Tehrani as possible) from standard Persian. For this purpose, 84 5-6 minute two-person conversations using ZOOM H5 professional voice recorder and Praat software from 28 speakers (14 men and women from Kashan + 14 men and women from Tehran) was recorded in space as quiet as possible. Then, 756 utterances were extracted, and their text grid was manually layered and labeled to measure and quantify acoustic correlations within the Taylor tilt model. Objective and statistical results showed that the introduced acoustic parametres have the potential to distinguish between the original Tehrani and Imitative Tehrani in the question utterances, but the tilt values for affirmative utterances is not differentiating.

Minjaee is the general name of some dialects of Luri that are known as Khorramabadi, Balageriveie, Silakhori, Boroujerdi, Malayeri, and so on. This study presents the acoustic parameters such as the first formant frequency and second formant frequency of Minjaee Luri monophthongs. As well it aims at studying the effect of gender and syllable (open and close) on these parameters. Finally, it is possible to obtain the vowel space diagram of Khorramabadi and Balageriveie dialects. The acoustic parameters of Minjaee Luri vowels /i/, /ɪ/, /ʏ/, /e/, /ø/, /a/, /ə/, /u/, /o/, /ɑ/, have been studied according to totally 1217 phonetic samples, produced by 18 participants (12 males and 6 females). Phonetic samples were analyzed by using PRAAT and the results were analyzed by SPSS. The study results were reported in two parts of descriptive and analytical statistics. According to the first formant frequency, vowels /a/ and /i/ are the highest and lowest vowels, respectively. Vowel /i/ shows the highest second formant frequency and is the frontest vowel in this dialect. While vowel /a/ in males and vowel /o/ in females are the most back ones. The vowel roundedness was investigated; it reduces the second formant of vowels. Men’s first and second formant frequencies are lower than women’s.

This study investigated the acoustic parameters of the fundamental frequency, first and second formant frequencies, duration and intensity in KhoramAbadi Luri vowels. 10 participants (5 male, 5 female) produced 1620 tokens, including /ɑ،y،ø،o،u،ə،a،e،ʏ،ɪ،i/ vowels. The result showed that /a/ has the lowest fundamental frequency; /e/ and /ʏ/ have the highest amount of this parameter in male and female speakers, respectively. /a/ and /i/ are the open and close vowels in KhoramAbadi Luri. /i/ and /o/ are the front and back vowels. /ø/ and /ɑ/ have the highest vowel duration amongst other vowels; /ʏ/ and /ə/ have the lowest vowel duration in male and female speakers, respectively. /e/ has the highest intensity in both male and female speakers; /a/ and /u/ have the lowest intensity in male and female speakers, respectively. Generally, female speakers have higher fundamental frequency, first and second formant frequencies and duration, but intensity is higher in male speakers.

Voicing is one of the most important phonological features in distinguishing consonants in many languages. In this study, we investigated the temporal parameters such as constriction duration, voice duration, and vowel duration in stop and fricative consonants of Azeri Turkish language in intervocalic position (VCV). The main purpose of this study is to study stop and fricative consonants in Tabrizi dialect. An attempt was made to answer the question of how the voicing of stop and fricative consonants of Turkish language affects the temporal parameters. Twelve selected words of Turkish common words were repeated by fourteen Tabrizi speakers. They were produced three times in citation form. The results showed that temporal parameters are considered as potential cues in distinguishing voiced and voiceless Turkish consonants. The results related to stop consonants also showed that only voice duration and vowel duration were effective in the voicing contrast. The results for the closure duration confirmed that there is no significant difference between voiced and voiceless stops and this cue can not be used as a distinguishing cue to voicing in Azeri Turkish stops.

The concepts presented in Persian medicine, as one of the holistic theories in complementary and alternative medicine, are closely related to other fields of sciences. Institutionalizing the World Health Organization's approach to the application of traditional medical schools requires an interdisciplinary academic approach. In Persian medicine, changing the quality of warmth and coldness can lead to a change in the quality of speech characteristics. One case of this quality change is the change in outside temperature due to climatic differences. Since according to the hypothesis of Persian medicine, climatic characteristics can affect the quality of warmth and coldness and consequently the rate of air exchange (Tarvih) and ultimately the qualities of sound and speech, the present study, with an inductive approach, tries to find evidence to refute or accept this hypothesis.

First, the reference books of Persian medicine, including Qanoun, Kamel al-Sena'a at-Tibbia and Zakhirih- e- Kharazm- Shahi were surveyed and materials related to the subject of speech and the quality of warmth and coldness were extracted. Then, Medical databases and search engines, including PubMed and Google Scholar, as well as linguistic databases were investigated.

The results show that in situations that according to the principles of Persian medicine lead to an increase in the quality of warmth, languages ​​with implosive consonants and clicks, as well as pharyngeal approximants and breathy voiced consonants are more concentrated. In addition, there is a greater tendency of concentration of the prototype of open-syllable languages and the languages with highest frequency of words ending to /h/ phoneme in warm areas. On the other hand, the focus of the prototype of the spectrum of close-syllable languages and the languages with the phenomenon of palatalization is more in the conditions and areas that lead to an increase in the quality of coldness.

The findings of this study are in line with the initial theory believing the qualities of warmth and coldness as external variables can influence speech characteristics. These results can be a confirmation on the hypothesis of the present study about the possibility of the relationship between speech characteristics and qualities of warmth and coldness from the perspective of Persian medicine, although there are other confounding factors that should be evaluated in larger studies.

Many languages have phonemes in their inventory that result from the combination of two different consonants and have a different manner of articulation. Affricates are created by the sequence of a stop and fricative consonant at the same place of articulation (Ledefoged, 2014; Crystal, 2008; Hayward, 2000; Johnson, 1997). Mahmoodzade (2009: 65) quoting Deihl and Castleman (1996: 192-200) states that the closure is one of the most important acoustic parameters in the affricate/fricative contrast. Also, the frication duration is another important cue to distinguish fricative from affricate consonants. In addition to frication and closure, the amplitude rise time is also one of the acoustic features that contrast fricatives and affricates. Amplitude rise time increases more rapidly than fricatives (Hayward, 2000; Johnson, 1997). Hayward also states that the closure duration and frication length are shorter than stop and fricatives respectively. The constriction of affricates consists of closure region of stop and frication region of fricative (2000, 368). Affricate consonants have received less attention, but in recent years, some studies have looked at affricates' properties in different languages ​​such as Hindi (Dixit and Hoffman, 2004), Korean (Kim, 2001; 2004), Italian (Falowski and Bendeto, 2011) and two dialects in Catalan (Recasens and Spinosa, 2007). Mitani et al., (2006) examined the perceptual distinction of voiceless fricative and affricate in Japanese. They found that many acoustic cues, including frication length and amplitude rise time play a role in distinguishing / ʃ / and / ʧ / in Japanese. Studies have been conducted in English to contrast the manner and place of articulation and also to investigate the differentiation between affricate and fricative consonants. Repp et al., (1978) compared the manner of articulation in / ʃ / and / ʧ / and showed that by reducing the frication length in the middle part of the frication, similar changes occur in the manner of two consonants. They conducted another experiment which also stated that the short interval is one of the important cues between affricates and fricatives in the term of manner of articulation.Azerbaijani or Azeri language belongs to the branch of a Turkic language family that has many speakers in the northwest of Iran and is one of the oldest languages ​​that have been used during various historical periods. Turkish is an agglutinative language ​​and has an Altaic origin (Hayat, 2001; Rashidian, 2013). The languages of ethnic groups such as Turks, Mongols, Tunghuz and Manchu are also Altaic, which have similarities with Uralic languages. It has 24 consonants and 9 vowels, of which 4 consonants including / ʦ /, / dz /, / ʧ / and / ʤ / are affricate consonants (Ghaffarvand Makari and Warner, 2017). Due to the lack of phonological studies in this language especially affricates, we decided to study the acoustic features of affricates / ʦ / and / dz /.  MATERIALS AND .

The present study conducted to investigate affricate consonants of the Turkish language. For this purpose, ten speakers of Turkish language, 5 men and 5 women participated in the experiment. The mean age of participants was 30.5. The recorded eighteen Turkish words were VC, CV and VCV syllables consisting of the affricates / ʦ / and / dz / in three Turkish vowel environment / ɑ /, / i / and / u /. The effect of different three high and low vowels was examined on silence duration, frication duration, and amplitude rise time. Stimuli were repeated 3 times by the participants in the experiment (18 samples × 10 speakers × 3 replicates). Acoustic analysis was performed in PRAAT software and SPSS software version 23 was used for statistical analysis. Closure and frication duration and amplitude rise time calculated manually on the spectrogram. The duration of closure was measured in the middle and final position, but due to the uncertainty of the closure initial phase at the beginning of the word (Castleman, 1997; Mahmoodzade, 1388: 85), this parameter was not measured in CV syllable. The amplitude rise time was also measured in a time span of frication onset to the point where the frication reaches the maximum amplitude (Mahmoodzade, 2009: 91). 

Acoustic analysis of Turkish affricates showed that voicing had no effect on the duration of silence and cannot be used as a cue to distinguish the voicing parameter in these consonants. The difference between the mean duration of frication and amplitude rise time indicates that these two parameters are considered as acoustic cues in voicing. In addition to voicing, other factors such as consonant position and vowel environment were also examined. The consonant position also showed a significant effect on silence duration, frication duration and amplitude rise time, so that the average of all three parameters is higher in the final position. The results related to the vowel environment / ɑ /, / i / and / u / on the duration of silence, the duration of frication and amplitude rise time indicate that the length of silence in the vowel environment / ɑ / and / i / and the frication duration and amplitude rise time are also longer in the / i / and / u / vowel environment. 

The results showed that voicing has no effect on closure duration in Turkish affricates. However, the frication duration and amplitude rise time are affected by voicing. In addition to the voicing feature, the consonant position in the syllable and vowel environment were also examined. tests results showed that the consonant position in syllable and vowel environments has a significant effect on closure duration, frication duration, and amplitude rise time and all three parameters are longer in the final position. Also, the closure and frication duration are longer in the presence of /ɑ, i/ and /i, u/ respectively. High amplitude rise time obtained in the presence of high vowels.

The notion of implicature was proposed by Grice (1975) who introduced two kinds of implicatures. Implicature is the level of meaning beyond the semantic meaning of the words uttered by the speaker or written by the writer. Neo-Griceans developed this notion more widely and proposed other types. An implicature is generated intentionally by the speaker and may (or may not) be understood by the hearer. Prosodic elements (pitch accent and its changes, pause, intensity, and duration) influence hearers' inferences in utterances having implicatures, and conveying different meanings. Therefore, we propose another class of implicatures namely “prosodic implicature”. It seems that some structures are grammatically underdetermined, i.e. the syntactic structure and lexical meaning are insufficient for determining their meanings, and the role of prosodic elements cannot be disregarded. Putting aside contextual effects, this paper argues in favor of the influence of prosodic elements. In a three-step experiment (a written test, and two listening tests with two different prosodic elements), 8 utterances having conversational or scalar implicatures were presented to 20 examinees  whose first language  was Persian, and all mastered the standard Persian. Findings show that in scalar implicatures, “duration” affects the hearer’s inferring the upper bounds (upper items in the scales) or the lower bounds (lower items in the scales). In conversational implicatures, “changes in pitch range” and “intensity changes” influence the hearer’s inference. Moreover, this paper shows that in absence of prosodic elements, i.e., in writings, some meanings are default for some structures, and readers base their inferences on those defaults. So, it seems that some meanings might be unmarked for some structures which leads to many misunderstandings in interpretation of written utterances as in text messaging like SMS and online chats.

This study aimed to investigate the intonation pattern of Kashani utterances with broad, narrow, and contrastive focuses on different syntactic structures, which were obtained by changing the order of verbs, subjects, and objects. Our data included 4 sentences produced in 3 syntactic structures with a broad focus, 1 syntactic structure with a narrow focus, and 1 syntactic structure with a contrastive focus produced by 16 speakers (8 males and 8 females) from Kashan City. The data were recorded in an anechoic chamber with the sampling frequency of 22050 Hz. A total of 320 utterances (4 sentences × 5 cases × 16 speakers) were annotated in the 2 tiers of tone and phone by using Praat software. The fundamental frequency (F0) of each word was measured at 5 intervals. After the average value of F0 was calculated for each word, their pitch contours were drawn. The results showed that the pitch contours of unmarked Kashani utterances followed a falling pattern. Moreover, the pitch contours were sensitive to the position of each verb as the sentence nucleus. "Verb" was the last constituent that received the pitch accent in a sentence, while it de-accented the constituents coming after it. Finally, the focal constituents appeared at the end of the sentences with narrow or contrastive focuses. These constituents had high prominence and amplitude compared to the other constituents in the sentences. In addition, alignment of the accent peaks in all the accented syllables corresponded to the vowels of the next syllables. The results of this research could be helpful in understanding the typologies of languages and dialects and identifying speakers of varied dialects.

Mezaj (temperament) is one of the basic concepts of traditional Persian medicine that can distinguish individual characteristics of human beings. Considering the importance of other branches of science in the basic concepts of Persian medicine, an interdisciplinary approach to this medical school seems inevitable. The aim of the present interdisciplinary research is to investigate the relationship between speech indicators in linguistics and theoretical concepts of Mezaj in Persian medicine.

This descriptive survey used Persian medicine criteria and linguistic canon and databases in a deductive method.

The results of this study suggest that there may be a relationship between warmth and some features of speech. On the one hand, the greatest focus of tendency of simple tonal and especially complex tonal languages is ​​in warm regions of the earth, and on the other hand, there are some connections between some of the speech characteristics of warm Mezaj, such as the high speed of speech (syllable per second) and also the very high verbal overlap in the speech of persons with warm Mezaj.

 From the beginning to the end of the article, the principle of honesty and trustworthiness has been observed.

The present study can be used as a basis for designing future interventional or observational research in the interdisciplinary field between linguistics and Persian medicine.

Using the auditory-acoustic approach, the present study examines the possibility of using durational acoustic parameters of speech rhythm for detecting the Persian speakers’ use of Azeri as a form of voice disguise. To do so, continuous speech of 5 speakers of Standard Persian and 5 speakers of Azeri, Tabrizi variety, were chosen for the acoustic and statistical analysis after completing the validity procedures. All Persian speakers were monolingual and all Azeri speakers were bilingual speakers of Azeri and Persian, who spoke Azeri as their mother tongue and Persian as their second language. Each Persian speaker was asked to narrate a lifetime experience once in Persian (Persian- Persian data), and once as an imitation of Azeri (Persian- Azeri data). Azeri speakers were also asked to narrate a lifetime experience once in Azeri (Azeri- Azeri data) and once in Persian (Azeri-Persian Data). Persian-Azeri data is the type that is considered as the disguised data in this survey. The recorded data were then annotated in five tiers: segment, CV-segment, CV-segment interval, CV-interval and syllable. In order to control the effect of any unwanted variable, one minute (±5 seconds SD) of each sound file was extracted for further acoustic and statistical analyses. A Praat script, DurationAnalyzer, was used to automatically calculate the acoustic correlates of durational parameters of speech rhythm. These parameters are: %V (the proportion which speech is vocalic), ΔC (ln) (standard deviation of the natural-log normalized duration of consonantal intervals), ΔV (ln) (standard deviation of the natural-log normalized duration of vocalic intervals), nPVI- V (rate-normalized averaged durational differences between consecutive vocalic intervals) and syllable rate.  Results revealed there was a significant difference between the proposed types of data and that%V and syllable rate best discriminated between them; however, none of the above-mentioned parameters were significantly different between Persian-Azeri and Azeri-Persian data.

The article proposes a fuzzy approach to Modern Persian perceptual vowel space. The theory of fuzzy sets is based on multi-valued logic, in which a category has no sharp boundary, so a membership function plays a key role. To achieve our goal, we carried out an acoustic experiment. A number of 96*2 synthetic stimuli of the six vowels in Modern Persian (/i,e,a,ɑ,o,u/) were examined through an Identification test. Each of the stimuli was randomly played twice for twenty participants (10 males and 10 females) and the values of the vowels’ first two formants (F1 and F2) were recorded. Based on the collected data, not only were the “crisp values” and “fuzzy values” of vowels tabulated, but the areas of “auditory clarity” and “auditory vagueness” around each vowel were also identified. The results showed that the vowel continuum between two adjacent vowels were vaguely perceived by the participants. It  was concluded that fuzzy vowels have no clearly defined boundaries. In other words, they may contain partial degrees of membership denoted by a real number that ranges from zero (meaning no membership) to one (meaning complete membership). Moreover, the  fuzzy sets theory proved to have the ability to calculate and explicate the overlapping vowels in the vowel space.

In recent years, numerous studies have been done on the impact of different speech styles on the changes of prosodic elements. Sociophonetics examines the combination of techniques, elements, and theoretical frameworks in phonology and sociology. The present study, within the framework of sociophonetics studies, examines the effect of context on the fundamental frequency, intensity and duration of identical word pairs and paragraphs in two different religious and nonreligious contexts using PRAAT software version 5.4.17. For this purpose, ten female participants with an average age of 29 years were asked to read 8 paragraphs (4 paragraphs with religious context and 4 paragraphs with non-religious context).Each paragraph contains one of the target research names (Fatemeh, Mohammad, Abbas, and Hossein). The purpose is to study the difference between the average fundamental frequency (Hz), duration (ms), and intensity (dB) in the same words but in both religious and non-religious contexts. The results show that the difference between the duration of identical word pairs in the two religious and non-religious contexts is statistically significant, meaning that the duration of the words in the religious context was longer.

The multimodal perception and production of speech production have gained a lot of attention as a result of various studies in the 1990s up to now. Although there are discussions about the importance of the role of different perceptual systems in speech production, there is agreement over the facilitating role of vision in speech. This experimental study examines the impact of congenital visual deprivation on the production of Persian voiced stop consonants as well as the patients’ compensation strategies for producing these phonemes. The researcher recorded 864 naturally produced speech samples from eight congenitally blind children and eight sighted ones all ranging from 8 to 15 years (mean age: 13±1.69 years old) during the production of the three repetitions of the Persian stop-vowel consonants in a CV sequences. The results of The F2 and F3 formant transition analyses revealed that blindness may have an effect on the difference of offset and onset of the second formant transition. However, the onset and offset of the second and third formant transition and the difference of the offset and onset of the third formant transition were unaffected.

Fricatives not only differ in their acoustic structures from one language to another, but also they vary considerably from individual to individual. Acoustic correlates of fricatives are sensitive to the shape and size of the resonance cavity in front of the oral constriction. It is therefore conceivable that any physical change in the length and place of constriction during production of fricatives may alter the resultant acoustic signals. This research attempts to explore potential speaker-specific acoustic parameters of voiceless fricatives in Persian based on experimental phonetics. Therefore, acoustic parameters of center of gravity and fricative duration are investigated for each voiceless fricative in Persian. This research aims to discover whether voiceless fricatives and selected acoustic parameters are able to discriminate between speakers in Persian and whether these fricatives and acoustic parameters are of assistance in segregating speakers in Persian. According to the aforementioned considerations, the following questions are presented in this paper: Do the selected acoustic parameters (center of gravity and duration) of voiceless fricatives have capacity to differentiate speakers in Persian? Which acoustic parameters and which voiceless fricatives discriminate Persian speakers the best? Furthermore, we will compare the results of the present study to the findings of previous studies to see in what way Persian has been similar or different from other investigated languages. In order to analyze between- and within speaker variability of voiceless fricatives, 24 Persian speakers (12 male, 12 female) on two separate occasions were recorded in the sound proof booth at phonetics laboratory of Alzahra University. Non-contemporaneous recording of speech material allows us to measure the degree of within-speaker variability across each speaker. The speech material consists of a read passage which contains 54 Persian sentences including relevant voiceless fricatives Speech tokens were acoustically measured with PRAAT version 5.2.34 and statistical analyses were carried out with SPSS version 21 and R version 3.3.3.Results and Results of this study indicated that for female speakers, center of gravity of /S/ and s/  have the best performance in showing between-speaker variability. For male speakers, center of gravity of /s/ is the most highly discriminant acoustic parameters across speakers. Moreover, fricative duration was not reported as a promising acoustic parameter. Center of gravity is directly linked to the size and length of the vocal tract. The longer is the length of the vocal tract, the higher is the center of gravity and vice versa. This indicates that anatomical differences between speaker’s vocal tract influence the acoustic properties of fricatives and ultimately make them distinctive. In the future studies, additional parametric potential speaker-specific features will be examined in order to determine a set of well-established discriminant parameters for voiceless fricatives in Persian.

This study investigated the effect of speaking rate on the voice onset time (vot) stop consonant production in standard contemporary Persian. For this purpose, a production experiment was performed. Eight sentences were produced by twenty- four participants (seven male- seventeen female) at different speaking rates (slow- normal & fast) three times each. Voice onset time (VOT) distributions and mean VOT values were examined for initial and intervocalic labial, alveolar, palatal and velar stop consonants in context at slow, normal and fast rates of speech. At last, 1152 data were elicited. Results revealed that the short lag and pre-voiced category didn't change as a function of speaking rate, although VOT values for long lag category were affected by changes in speaking rate. Implication of the results suggest that in standard contemporary Persian, "aspiration" is affected by changes in speaking rate.

La phonétique, y incluse la prosodie, reste toujours un objectif secondaire malgré l’insistance sur la compétence de communication en didactique des langues. Les objectifs dépassent aujourd’hui le quoi dire afin d’atteindre le comment dire dans les situations de communication. Pourtant, les enseignants et les apprenants iraniens ne s’en occupent pas assez et les buts se résument en un enseignement/apprentissage linguistique, où l’intelligibilité du message passe par le bon emplacement des éléments purement linguistiques. La perception et la production de la prosodie, l’intonation y étant basée, nous préoccupent dans cette recherche. Ainsi, nous cherchons les difficultés de la question chez les apprenants iraniens (A1) du FLE. La problématique sera étudiée à partir de six énoncés dont trois interrogatifs et trois affirmatifs. Les analyses se basent sur des données audio, enregistrées chez les inforrmants constitués de 6 hommes et 6 femmes ; et sont faites sur le logiciel d’analyse de la parole, Praat, et sur SPSS 16.0. Selon les résultats, les affirmations posent moins de problèmes que les interrogations, vu la ressemblance entre l’intonation du français et celle du persan à la frontière tonale. Quant aux interrogations, la question totale, renvoyant à la même construction prosodique en persan, se rapproche de l’intonation authentique. Néanmoins, les courbes intonatives ne sont pas compatibles et cela s’explique par les productions linéaires des apprenants annonçant le manque de respect de la prosodie. La durée étant en question, elle est dans 51 cas sur un total de 72 plus longue que celle des authentiques.

This study investigated the acoustic parameters of the first (F1) and the second (F2) formant frequencies of monophthongs and diphthongs in Kermanshahi Kurdish based on 5260 tokens, including /i, e, a, ɑ, o, u, y, ɑi, au, ei, ɑu/ in word and sentence context produced by 20 male and female speakers in a sound proof room. The results showed that /y/ and /a/ are close and open vowels and /i/ and /u/ are front and back vowels in this dialect, respectively. Based on the mean value, /y/ in this dialect is a rounded vowel. According to the statistical analysis, the mean difference in F1 onset was significant in word and sentence context; this amount was higher in word context than sentence context, whereas in offset it was higher in sentence context. The F2 onset and offset have a lower amount in word context than sentence context. Overall, F1 and F2 were lower in male speakers than female speakers.

Voicing is one of the controversial matters in phonetics. As we know consonants divide to two parts, voiced and voiceless. The vibration of vocal cords during closure makes consonants voiced and when we don’t have vibration during closure, we will have voiceless consonants. At the onset of syllable, If a vowel or a sonorant consonant comes after consonant, being voiced or voiceless feature affect the voice onset time of vowel or sonorant. VOT (voice onset time) is a term that created by Abramson and Lisker in 1964 and it is the time interval between stop release and beginning of waves which shows larynx movement leads to articlate a vowel. One of the effective factors on VOT is the place of stop consonant in word (context). In this paper VOT measured in PRAATsoftware in three places (initial, intervocalic and after voiceless fricative). Results showed that the difference between VOT in three places is meaningful.

McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon in which subjects use information from both auditory and visual modalities to come into a unified percept. In the classic example of McGurk, when auditory /bɑ/ is dubbed over the lip movements of /ɡɑ/ , subjects report perceiving /da/. Although this illusion is not considered a universal one, it is experienced by the majority of subjects. The effect had been the subject of multiple studies in different languages. The present study is the first survey which examines this effect in Persian and Kermanshahi Kurdish language. Our main question is to examine whether the effect is significant in Persian and Kermanshahi Kurdish language. We also investigated the effect of gender on the occurrence of this phenomenon. It investigated McGurk in Persian and Kermanshahi Kurdish subjects. 121 (11*11) audiovisual stimuli were presented to 120 subjects (60 Persian speakers and 60 Kermanshahi Kurdish speakers). The Results demonstrate a reduced McGurk effect in both Persian and Kermanshahi Kurdish subjects; however, the probability of its occurrence is significant in Kermanshahi Kurdish. The phenomenon is highly significant when an auditory labial CV is dubbed with a visual velar CV for Persian subjects; however, for Kermanshahi Kurdish subjects the effect was robust when an auditory velar CV is dubbed with a visual palatal CV. The effect of gender (both presenter and subjects) on the occurrence of this effect is also studied in this research. Results show significant effect of gender on audio-visual perception of consonants. However, if the percept happens, female presenters significantly affect the audio-visual perception of the subjects.

1- This research attempts to investigate the effects of forensically-relevant facial concealment on voiceless fricatives /f, s, ʃ/ in Farsi. There are various types of face-concealing garments that are commonly worn by people for the occupational, recreational, religious, and cultural purposes .These coverings may be typically used as disguises during the commission of crime by delinquents. Among these face coverings, one can refer to surgical masks, motorcycle helmets, and niqāb. Certainly, face coverings have an effect on the way the speech is produced. The way we produce speech is likely to be modified when a mask is covering our face. In such situations, the default motor activity of certain articulators such as lips make an effect on normal facial surface behaviours and natural jaw motions. Llamas (2008) claims that even more minor modification to the articulatory gestures during speech production may alter the resultant acoustic signal. When a fabric or other material is covering the mouth and nose, the propagation of the sound wave will be impeded, and the sound energy of certain spectral components of the signal will be absorbed. Nowadays, forensic speech scientists are encountered with such cases. The purpose of this study is firstly is to contribute to facewar research within forensic phonetics and secondly to prepare the experts to take that knowledge into account during their analysis when they are working on speech materials produced through facewear. Therefore, the present study centers on this question: Are the acoustic properties of facewear speech different from those of control speech. Thus, the current study explores the acoustic properties of voiceless fricatives /f, s, ʃ/ in Farsi both in control and facewear conditions.
2- Five female speakers were recorded in a professional acoustic laboratory at the University of Alzahra. The mean age of the five selected speakers was 29.They aged from 27 to 31. The speech material consists of 18 non words. Each non word was repeated twice. These were extracted from the /CɑC/ syllables. The total data set comprises 900 tokens: 5 speakers × 18 non words × 2 repetitions × 1 facewear conditions. Five types of facewear including unconcealed face, motorcycle helmet, rubber mask, surgical mask, and balaclavas without mouth hole, were tested in this study. Phonetic samples were analyzed using PRAAT version 5,2,34 and the statistical analysis of the data was performed by IBM SPSS version 21.0. To examine the effects of facewear on the acoustic speech signals, intensity and spectral parameters including friction intensity, center of gravity and spectral peak were measured.
3- The statistical analysis of the intensity of data revealed that facewear significantly affected the intensity of all voiceless fricatives. The main effect of facewear on intensity was significant for /f/ [F (4, 595) = 56.198, sig= 0.000], /s/ [F (4, 145) = 41.424, sig= 0.000], /ʃ/ [F (4, 145) = 40.481, sig= 0.000]. The intensity of the /f/ was smaller than 50 dB; while the intensity of /s/ and /ʃ/ were higher than 50 dB. The intensity of /s/ and /ʃ/ were more similar to each other than the intensity of /f/. For all the three voiceless fricatives, the effect of facewear on intensity was most noticeable in case of the helmet condition. Furthermore, surgical mask didn’t provoke large intensity changes relative to the control condition.
The statistical analysis revealed a significant main effect of facewearon on the spectral peak of all fricative, namely /f/ [F (4, 595) = 20.319, sig= 0.000], /s/ [F (4, 145) = 11.476, sig= 0.000], /ʃ/ [F (4, 145) = 3.524, sig= 0.009].The peak measures for /s/ and /ʃ/ were similar across facewear condition. In general, the peak measures for /s/ and /ʃ/ have been minimally affected through facewear condition. The peak measures for /s/ and /ʃ/ were acoustically less affected than those for /f/ because /f/ has diffuse spectral pattern.
The statistical analysis indicates that there was a significant main effect of facewear on the COG of /f/ [F (4, 595) = 50.245, sig= 0.000], /s/ [F (4, 145) = 20.683, sig= 0.000], /ʃ/ [F (4, 145) = 5.992, sig= 0.000].The results revealed that when /s/ is produced through facewear, it has the highest level of variation. This implies that sound energy is absorbed in higher frequency bands of the spectrum. This effect was most prominent in the rubber mask and helmet condition. Moreover, for /f/, the highest level of variation was in the helmet condition. The result indicates that the COG was only minimally affected when /ʃ/ was produced through facewear.
4- This survey attempts to explore the effects of forensically relevant face coverings on acoustic properties of voiceless fricatives /f, s, ʃ/ in Farsi. The voiceless fricatives, namely /s/, /ʃ/ and /f/ were chosen in this study because of the importance of fricative analysis in forensic phonetic caseworks and also for their energy distribution in higher frequency bands of the acoustic spectrum. To examine the effects of facewear on the acoustic speech signals, the intensity and spectral parameters including friction intensity, center of gravity, and spectral peak were measured. Phonetic samples were analyzed using PRAAT and the statistical analysis of the data was performed by IBM SPSS.
Findings indicate that facewear can considerably influence the intensity and spectral features of the voiceless fricatives /f, s, ʃ/. This was likely to be the result of some changes caused by face coverings which alter the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of the voiceless fricatives /f, s, ʃ/. The outcome reveals that intensity measure for the motorcycle helmet and COG measures for several face coverings (motorcycle helmet and rubber mask) show the highest values of changes. Furthermore, spectral peak of /f, s, ʃ/ compared to the intensity and COG has shown the least variation.