How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC[subscript i]VC[subscript i]). We examined three types of monosyllabic CCVC words:…

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

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…

It is well established that speakers accommodate in speech production. Recent work has shown a similar effect in perception--speech perception is affected by a listener's beliefs about the speaker. In this paper, we explore the consequences of such perceptual accommodation for experiments in speech perception and lexical access. Our interest is…

Previous research has shown that orthography influences the learning and processing of spoken non-native words. In this paper, we examine the effect of L1 orthography on non-native sound perception. In Experiment 1, 204 Spanish learners of Dutch and a control group of 20 native speakers of Dutch were asked to classify Dutch vowel tokens by…

Infants' auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test…

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) has been discussed in various studies that show that children around age 5 seem to violate Principle B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, and related works), when the antecedent of the pronoun is a name, but not when the antecedent is a quantifier. The analysis we propose can explain the DPBE in languages of…

A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a…

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…

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel…

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by…

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [t[superscript h]]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [t[superscript h]] or [flapped t] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous…

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 spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing…

Lexical tone languages make up the majority of all known languages of the world, but the role of tone in lexical processing remains unclear. In the present study, four form priming experiments examined the role of Mandarin tones in constraining lexical activation and the time course of the activation. When a prime and a target were related…