Recent neurobiological studies revealed evidence for lexical representations that are not specified for the coronal place of articulation (PLACE; Friedrich, Eulitz, & Lahiri, 2006; Friedrich, Lahiri, & Eulitz, 2008). Here we tested when these types of underspecified representations influence neuronal speech recognition. In a unimodal…

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated how phonological reductions (e.g., "puter" for "computer") modulate phonological competition. Participants listened to sentences extracted from a spontaneous speech corpus and saw four printed words: a target (e.g., "computer"), a competitor similar to the canonical form (e.g., "companion"), one similar…

Previous research has found that "similar" sounds interact in phonological nasal consonant harmony, wherein certain consonants become nasals when the word contains a nasal (e.g., Kikongo: /-kun-idi/ [right arrow] [-kun-ini] "planted"). Across languages, stops and approximants are chiefly affected, especially voiced consonants and ones that match…

Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh[ts], ch[ts[superscript h]], z[ts], c[ts[superscript h]], j[tc], q[tc[superscript h]), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native…

Morphological systems have been pivotal in exploring cognitive mechanisms of language use and acquisition. Adult English definite article form preference seems to depend non-deterministically on multiple factors. A corpus study of adult spontaneous speech revealed similar patterns of variability. In an experiment, article variant preferences of…

This comment on an article addresses two issues: (1) Different from what the authors of the article suggest, there are no theories of production claiming the phonological word to be the upper ground of advance planning before the onset of articulation; (2) the picture naming study of word frequency effect on speech onset is inconclusive by lack of…

Responds to a critique on an article and argues against criticisms put forth in the response. Shows that the hypotheses put forth in research about the scope of phonological encoding are well motivated in the context of current theories of speech production. (Author/VWL)

This study confirmed the following: Fowler's (1989) finding that duration is reduced for repeated words that involve Given information; evidence that Given repetitions are restricted to intra-topic discourse; evidence that duration is increased for new repetitions under intra-topic conditions; and evidence for shortening and lengthening are…

Investigated language functioning in a group of 89 children diagnosed with autism. Children were administered a battery of standardized language tests, tapping phonological, lexical, and higher-order language abilities. Among children with autism, there was significant heterogeneity in their language skills, although across all the children,…

Attempts to model the human production of language under time constraints based on an analysis of hesitation and spontaneous self-repair in a corpus of spoken human dialogs. The model used divides language production into conceptualization of the message to be conveyed, formulation of words and grammatical structure for the message, and…

Through experimentation, concurrent articulation was demonstrated to impair native English subject's ability to compare the internal stress patterns of written words. It was determined that the articulators' movements specifically affected stress analysis of words and this reflected postlexical, off-line processing. (25 references) (JL)

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

Examines picture naming latencies for predicted effects of two word retrieval factors: onset complexity and number of syllables. Results comport with evidence from speech errors and metalinguistic tasks and with predictions of the Node Structure theory of language production, but do not support production theories that do not predict special…

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…