The perception of lexical tones is addressed through research on South Kyungsang Korean, spoken in the southeastern part of Korea. Based on an earlier production study (Chang, 2008a, 2008b), a categorization experiment was conducted to determine the perceptually salient aspects of the perceptual nature of a high tone and a rising tone. The…

The present study is concerned with lax /[upsilon]/-fronting in Standard British English and in particular with whether this sound change in progress can be attributed to a waning of the perceptual compensation for the coarticulatory effects of context. Younger and older speakers produced various monosyllables in which /[upsilon]/ occurred in…

Perception is a product of the interaction between bottom-up sensory processing and top-down higher order cognitive activity. For example, when the initial phoneme of a word is obliterated and replaced with noise, listeners hear it as intact provided there is semantic context. We modified this phonemic restoration paradigm by masking (not…

This study investigates the influence of linguistic experience on the perception of pathologically-disordered voices using 18 listeners of American English, which has allophonic breathiness, 12 listeners of Gujarati, which contrasts breathy and modal vowels, and 18 listeners of Spanish, which has neither allophonic nor phonemic breathiness.…

L1-Spanish learners of English have been reported to distinguish English /i/ and /I/ on the basis of duration cues, whereas L1-English listeners primarily use spectral cues. Morrison (2008a) hypothesized that duration-based perception is a secondary developmental stage that emerges from an initial stage of multidimensional-category-goodness…

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech…

Reports an investigation of the auditory discrimination ability of black and white listeners when listening to both black and white speakers. (TO)

Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were…

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances…

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In that study, Dutch listeners made…

The canonical form for Japanese words is (Consonant)Vowel(Consonant) Vowel[approximately]. However, a regular process of high vowel devoicing between voiceless consonants and word-finally after voiceless consonants results in consonant clusters and word-final consonants, apparent violations of that phonotactic pattern. We investigated Japanese…

This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948).…

Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both…