This study aims to explore how the markedness effect shapes Mandarin slips of the tongue with respect to nasals in syllable-final positions. Data were collected via natural speech and elicitation tasks from 35 participants' reading of 346 test items. Three hundred and eight slips in Mandarin from natural data and 360 slips from elicited data were…

This study investigated the perception of American-English (AE) vowels and consonants by young adults who were either (a) early Arabic-English bilinguals whose native language was Arabic or (b) native speakers of the English dialects spoken in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where both groups were studying. In a closed-set format, participants…

Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters…

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER-SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that…

This article reports the results of speech error elicitation experiments investigating the role of two consonant co-occurrence restrictions in the productive grammar of speakers of two Ethiopian Semitic languages, Amharic and Chaha. Higher error rates were found with consonant combinations that violated co-occurrence constraints than with those…

Two experiments explored the tongue-twister paradigm, which involves reciting a word string several times over at a fast rate, using a task variation that minimizes articulatory and mnemonic load. The task was found to elicit good rates of "pure" articulatory errors. Two features had a significant error-reducing effect: repeated…

Describes how to use intonation and dialog context to improve the performance of an automatic speech-recognition system. Experiments utilized the DCIEM Maptask corpus, using a separate bigram language model for each type of move and showing that, with the correct move-specific language model for each utterance in the test set, the recognizer's…

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…