There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult…

This study examined how native speakers of Australian English and French, nontone languages with different lexical stress properties, perceived Mandarin tones in a sentence environment according to their native sentence intonation categories (i-Categories) in connected speech. Results showed that both English and French speakers categorized…

Productions of /s/ and /z/ by ten adult speakers were investigated using the electropalatograph (EPG). The participants, ten speech researchers who spoke English as their first language, recorded productions of /s/ and /z/ in nonsense and real words. The maximum contact frame was used as the point of reference to compare tongue/palate contact for…

This paper reports on increases in the phonetic inventories of nine children in the fifth and sixth years of experience with cochlear implants. Thirty-six of 44 phones in Australian English reached criterion levels, resulting in intelligible, but not completely natural, speech. The rate of improvement in the sixth year was slow, indicating a…

This study examined Australian English (AE) and Thai-English bilingual (TE) speakers' ability to perceive word-final stops in their native and non-native languages. In the perception experiment, the TE listeners were able to discriminate stop contrasts differing only in place of articulation (/p/-/t/, /p/-/k/, /t/-/k/) in both English and Thai…