Notes that in phonetic categorization, listeners hear a range of speech sounds forming a continuum of ambiguous sounds between two endpoints and are required to identify the sounds as one or other of the endpoints. Points out that this task has been used in phonetics and in psycholinguistics to study categorical perception, selective adaptation,…

Examines the development of a computational model of auditory grouping processes informed by psychoacoustic experimentation. The experimental theme was to quantify the contribution of grouping principles, rather than simply to demonstrate their existence. This article demonstrates the importance of avoiding prespecified procedures for grouping…

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…

Summarizes the use of word-spotting in psycholinguistic research. Notes that listeners hear a list of nonsense words, some of which contain embedded real words, and they detect those embedded words, a task designed to study the segmentation of continuous speech. Describes the task and summarizes its advantages and disadvantages. (12 references)…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

Presents a distributed connectionist model of the perception of spoken words, employing speech representation that combines lexical and abstract phonological information, with lexical access as a direct mapping on this distributed representation. The article examines the integration of partial cues to phonological identity, showing that the model…

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)

Emphasizes that auditory lexical decision has wide applicability and that the paradigm is currently used to study basic processes in word recognition, the nature of the mental lexicon, effects of word frequency, neighbor effects and various other phenomena of isolated word perception. Article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of this task. (54…