Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. "Journal of Memory and Language," 62, 67-82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order "n"-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about…

Memory-based language processing (MBLP) is an approach to language processing based on exemplar storage during learning and analogical reasoning during processing. From a cognitive perspective, the approach is attractive as a model for human language processing because it does not make any assumptions about the way abstractions are shaped, nor any…

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

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…

Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the…

We examined the relationship between the acoustic duration of syllables and the silent pauses that follow them in Cantonese. The results showed that at major syntactic junctures, acoustic plus silent pause durations were quite similar for a number of different syllable types whose acoustic durations differed substantially. In addition, it appeared…

Compares phonetic implementation of the stop-voicing contrast produced in Arabic by Saudi Arabians and by both Americans and Saudis in English. Saudis used temporal aspects of voicing in Arabic while speaking English. This caused few communication problems, with the exception of the phoneme (p), which has no Arabic counterpart. (Author/PJM)

Investigates vowel alternations governed by tensing, particularly pairs without vowel reduction, where several lax vowels alternate with a single tense vowel. Takes alternation data and a strict correlation between spelling and pronunciation of tensed vowels as the basis for an analysis of these vowels' underlying representation. (Author/MES)

Reports a preliminary investigation into the pitch correlates of politeness formulae produced by English and Japanese informants of both sexes. Because of differences in sociosemiotic function of pitch, Japanese females' pitch is more differentiated from the Japanese male pitch than is that of the English female from the English male. (Author/PJM)

Shows that hesitation phenomena are intricately connected with propspective and retrospective speech production tasks and mark critical points in processing. Two major hesitation categories exist: stalls and repairs. Stalls head off errors and represent error-free output; repairs take care of errors already committed. English and German examples…

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

Compares the ability of English speakers and Portuguese speakers to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task that tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli.(Author/VWL)