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 examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

Comparison of the lexical characteristics of 88 auditory misperceptions showed no difference in word-frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency between the actual and the perceived utterances. Another comparison showed that slip of the ear tokens had denser neighborhoods and higher neighborhood frequency than words in general.…

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

Examines the effect of redundancy of information on the intelligibility of hearing and deaf children's speech. Based on intelligibility scores obtained for a set of words presented both in context and in isolation, suggests that the children do not use the same production strategies to assist listeners. (Author/MES)

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)