The perception of lexical tones is addressed through research on South Kyungsang Korean, spoken in the southeastern part of Korea. Based on an earlier production study (Chang, 2008a, 2008b), a categorization experiment was conducted to determine the perceptually salient aspects of the perceptual nature of a high tone and a rising tone. The…

Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kugler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for…

Previous research using picture/word matching tasks has demonstrated a tendency to incorrectly interpret phrasally stressed strings as compounds. Using event-related potentials, we sought to determine whether this pattern stems from poor perceptual sensitivity to the compound/phrasal stress distinction, or from a post-perceptual bias in behavioral…

Talkers are known to compensate only partially for experimentally-induced changes to their auditory feedback. In a typical experiment, talkers might hear their F1 feedback shifted higher (so that /[epsilon]/ sounds like /[ash]/, for example), and compensate by lowering F1 in their subsequent speech by about a quarter of that distance. Here, we…

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker. This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result…

The present study is concerned with lax /[upsilon]/-fronting in Standard British English and in particular with whether this sound change in progress can be attributed to a waning of the perceptual compensation for the coarticulatory effects of context. Younger and older speakers produced various monosyllables in which /[upsilon]/ occurred in…

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered…

The German sibilant /esh/ is produced with a constriction in the postalveolar region and often with protruded lips. By covarying horizontal lip and tongue position speakers can keep a similar acoustic output even if the articulation varies. This study investigates whether during two weeks of adaptation to an artificial palate speakers covary these…

The phonological processes known as "lenition" have traditionally been explained as articulatory effort reduction. However, such a motivation for lenition has never been directly demonstrated; in addition, there are reasons to doubt the articulatory explanation.This paper focuses on a particular type of lenition (intervocalic…

This study investigates the influence of linguistic experience on the perception of pathologically-disordered voices using 18 listeners of American English, which has allophonic breathiness, 12 listeners of Gujarati, which contrasts breathy and modal vowels, and 18 listeners of Spanish, which has neither allophonic nor phonemic breathiness.…

Prosodic contrastive focus is used to attract the listener's attention to a specific part of the utterance. Mostly conceived of as auditory/acoustic, it also has visible correlates which have been shown to be perceived. This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual…

The current experiments examined how native Parisian French and native Swiss French listeners use vowel duration in perceiving the /[openo]/-/o/ contrast. In both Parisian and Swiss French /o/ is longer than /[openo]/, but the difference is relatively large in Swiss French and quite small in Parisian French. In Experiment 1 we found a parallel…

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs. kiiro), consonant length (e.g., kite vs. kitte) and syllable number/length (e.g., kjoo vs. kijoo) was examined. Stimuli consisted of sentence-length utterances produced by a native Japanese talker; five minimal pairs of each contrast type were included. Questions…

Two experiments investigate the effectiveness of audiovisual (AV) speech cues (cues derived from both seeing and hearing a talker speak) in facilitating perceptual learning of spectrally distorted speech. Speech was distorted through an eight channel noise-vocoder which shifted the spectral envelope of the speech signal to simulate the properties…

The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected…