In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Tonal languages differ in how they use phonetic correlates, e.g. average pitch height and pitch direction, for tonal contrasts. Thus, native speakers of a tonal language may need to adjust their attention to familiar or unfamiliar phonetic cues when perceiving non-native tones. On the other hand, speakers of a non-tonal language may need to…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when factoring out speaker characteristics such as sex, age, dialect, and so on. Some speakers share common features and can cohere into groups based on gross vocal similarity but, to date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based…

Purpose: In perception studies, it is common to use vowel stimuli from standardized recordings or synthetic stimuli created using values from well-known published research. Although the use of standardized stimuli is convenient, unconsidered dialect and regional accent differences may introduce confounding effects. The goal of this study was to…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels "colored" by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was…

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…

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…

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The…