Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

Adults tend to perceive speech sounds from their native language as members of distinct and stable categories; however, they fail to perceive differences between many non-native speech sounds without a great deal of training. The present study investigates the effects of categorization training on adults' ability to discriminate non-native…

The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6- to 8-month-olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old-new-old-new). Perception…