Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis (PPH, Cabrelli Amaro & Rothman, 2010) attempts to reconcile evidence suggesting some L2 learners, however rare, attain native-like L2 phonological systems with the observation that most do not. Considering existing L2 phonology research, it is not clear that phonological differences between early and…

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels "colored" by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was…

Previous research using the name-based categorization task has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn 2 words that only differ by 1 consonantal feature but fail to do so when the words only differ by 1 vocalic feature. This asymmetry was taken as evidence for the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels at the…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…

A distribution of the Italian definite articles "il" and "lo" is proposed that makes use of both Steriade's syllabification rules and a language-specific sonority hierarchy. The incorporation of these rules results in the generalization that the definite article "il" occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a consonant that is a member of…

Replicating research originally performed with native speakers of English, this study investigated the mutability of vowels in Spanish. The study was based on the theory that when presented with non-words, native speakers are more likely to change the vowel than the consonant to arrive at an existing lexical item. It was hypothesized that if…

Explains distributional regularity (DR), an intuition that sound sequences occurring frequently and in multiple contexts are candidates for the lexicon. Describes study that proposed hypotheses about children's segmenting sounds using DR functions, exploiting phonotactic constraints on pronunciation, and learning word-boundary clusters. Details…

Reports the results of three experiments that used vowel and tone monitoring tasks to investigate the role of tone information in processing Mandarin. (Author/VWL)

One of a series of semiannual reports, this publication contains 13 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles and their authors are as follows: "The Role of Contrast in Limiting Vowel-to-Vowel Coarticulation in Different…

Data obtained from a test of erasing an initial consonant or vowel of nonwords are presented and discussed to prove the inefficiency of processing when depending solely on acoustic decontextualized data. The experimental paradigm is the same as that used by the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. (six references) (LB)