In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words.…

In speech production, high-frequency words are more likely than low-frequency words to be phonologically reduced. We tested in an eye-tracking experiment whether listeners can make use of this correlation between lexical frequency and phonological realization of words. Participants heard prefixed verbs in which the prefix was either fully produced…

Native listeners adapt to noncanonically produced speech by retuning phoneme boundaries by means of lexical knowledge. We asked whether a second language lexicon can also guide category retuning and whether perceptual learning transfers from a second language (L2) to the native language (L1). During a Dutch lexical-decision task, German and Dutch…

This study investigated the development of second language online auditory processing with ab initio German learners of Dutch. We assessed the influence of different levels of background noise and different levels of semantic and syntactic target word predictability on word-monitoring latencies. There was evidence of syntactic, but not…

In British English, the phrase "Canada aided" can sound like "Canada raided" if the speaker links the two vowels at the word boundary with an intrusive /r/. There are subtle phonetic differences between an onset /r/ and an intrusive /r/, however. With cross-modal priming and eye-tracking, we examine how native British English listeners and…

The extent to which the phonetic system of a second language is mastered varies across individuals. The present study evaluates the pattern of individual differences in late bilinguals across different phonological processes. Fifty-five late Dutch-English bilinguals were tested on their ability to perceive a difficult L2 speech contrast (the…

Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is "tas," bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of "tast," touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4…

World knowledge influences how we perceive the world. This study shows that this influence is at least partly mediated by declarative memory. Dutch and German participants categorized hues from a yellow-to-orange continuum on stimuli that were prototypically orange or yellow and that were also associated with these color labels. Both groups gave…

In four experiments, we investigated how listeners compensate for reduced /t/ in Dutch. Mitterer and Ernestus [Mitterer, H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). "Listeners recover /t/s that speakers lenite: evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch." "Journal of Phonetics," 34, 73-103] showed that listeners are biased to perceive a /t/ more easily after /s/ than…

In a series of 5 experiments, we investigated whether the processing of phonologically assimilated utterances is influenced by language learning. Previous experiments had shown that phonological assimilations, such as /lean#bacon/ [right arrow] [leam bacon], are compensated for in perception. In this article, we investigated whether compensation…