Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

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…

It is well established that speakers accommodate in speech production. Recent work has shown a similar effect in perception--speech perception is affected by a listener's beliefs about the speaker. In this paper, we explore the consequences of such perceptual accommodation for experiments in speech perception and lexical access. Our interest is…

Infants' auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

Outlines an approach for studying auditory levels in speech perception, focusing on the artificial speech understanding system that is most compatible with the experimental data obtained in speech perception research. (RL)

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

Augments Michael Studdert-Kennedy's state-of-the-art report on speech perception research (EJ 227 656) with comments on categorical perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli, speech perception in context, the role of prosody, and development/impairments of speech perception. Includes a summary of a discussion on speech perception research. (RL)

Describes an investigation of the notion that sentence perception involves holding single clauses or propositions in a temporary buffer. Concludes that this notion is false and that, instead, more recently presented or important material may become more accessible in memory as presentation of the sentence proceeds. (Author/SED)

Indicates that the direction of articulatory substitution for 13 consonants is identical to the direction of auditory perceptual substitution defined by shifts of phonological features. (Author/RL)

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Analyzes the production and perception of illocutionary forms. Using a semantic neutralization procedure, the performance of children (5, 7, and 9 years old) and adults was compared in two experiments focusing on prosodic representations in production and perception tasks. (Author/JL)

Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of life, beginning earlier for vowels than for consonants. This age-related decline in sensitivity to perceive non-native…