Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress…

Prosodic contrastive focus is used to attract the listener's attention to a specific part of the utterance. Mostly conceived of as auditory/acoustic, it also has visible correlates which have been shown to be perceived. This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

Evaluation of methods and techniques for conversational and multimodal spoken dialogue systems is complex, as is gathering data for the modeling and tuning of such techniques. This article describes MushyPeek, an experiment framework that allows us to manipulate the audiovisual behavior of interlocutors in a setting similar to face-to-face…

In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, supposedly…

Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally,…

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are…

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…

This paper explores two related factors which influence variation in duration, prosodic structure and redundancy in spontaneous speech. We argue that the constraint of producing robust communication while efficiently expending articulatory effort leads to an inverse relationship between language redundancy and duration. The inverse relationship…

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children' s knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct…

Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant' s first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed…

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form "Do you live in [place name]?" produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of…

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically…

Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of life, beginning earlier for vowels than for consonants. This age-related decline in sensitivity to perceive non-native…