This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

The detrimental consequences of suggestive witness manipulation have been frequently discussed in the literature. Notably, these discussions have been limited to the consequences of suggestive question types and interrogator conduct. This study is the first to investigate the influence of interrogator's intonation on interrogative suggestibility.…

Purpose: We investigated whether rhythm discrimination is mainly driven by the native language of the listener or by the fundamental design of the human auditory system and universal cognitive mechanisms shared by all people irrespective of rhythmic patterns in their native language. Method: In multiple experiments, we asked participants to listen…

The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

This dissertation proposes a model of phonological relationships, the Probabilistic Phonological Relationship Model (PPRM), that quantifies how predictably distributed two sounds in a relationship are. It builds on a core premise of traditional phonological analysis, that the ability to define phonological relationships such as contrast and…

Research supported by the Princeton University Council on Research, the Duke University Research Council, the Duke Endowment Fellowship Fund, and the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society. (DD)

See FL 502 583 for the first part of this article. (RS)

Addresses the relationship between phonology and morphology, using the vowel alternations of Standard German Umlaut and Ablaut as relevant examples. The article analyzes Umlaut as a completely unified process of vowel fronting, whereas it argues that Ablaut is synchronically a totally unpredictable vowel change found in the paradigms of strong…

Analyzes the near-complementary distribution of the German palatal fricative [c] and velar fricative [x] as a counterexample to Structural Preservation because the rule of Fricative Assimilation (FA) introduces the nondistinctive feature [back] lexically. The analysis presented derives both [x] and [c] from the archiphoneme /X/ via FA and a…

Part of a special issue, "Materialien zur Rechtschreibung und ihrer Reform" (Materials on Orthograp and Its Reform). (DD)

Part of Lexicography and Dialect Geography, Festgabe for Hans Kurath''. (DD)

In the third of a series on the logic of European languages, phonological, morphological, and syntactic idiosyncracies of German are discussed as they relate to the language's cultural context and philosophical heritage. (MSE)

This article makes two points about foreign language: (1) proper pronunciation is indispensable to initial accuracy and comprehension, as well as to later study of literature and culture; and (2) the best approach to pronunciation is based on the native language as a contrastive model. Taking as an example the learning of German by…