In connected speech, phonological assimilation to neighboring words can lead to pronunciation variants (e.g., "garden bench" [arrow right] "garde'm' bench"). A large body of literature suggests that listeners use the phonetic context to reconstruct the intended word for assimilation types that often lead to incomplete assimilations (e.g., a…

Previous studies have suggested that the perception of vowels and consonants changes from language-universal to language-specific between 6 and 12 months of age. This report suggests that language-specific perception emerges even earlier for lexical tones. Experiment 1 tested English-learners' perception of Cantonese tones, replicating declines in…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…