Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

Examined the processing of potential auditory and visual cues that differentiate statements from echoic questions. Found that both auditory and visual cues reliably conveyed statement and question intonation, were successfully synthesized, and generalized to other utterances. (Author/VWL)

Comparison of the lexical characteristics of 88 auditory misperceptions showed no difference in word-frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency between the actual and the perceived utterances. Another comparison showed that slip of the ear tokens had denser neighborhoods and higher neighborhood frequency than words in general.…

Effects of variation from stimulus to stimulus in emotional tone of voice on speech perception were examined through a series of perceptual experiments. Stimuli were recorded from human speakers who produced utterances in tones of voice designed to convey affective information. Stimuli varying in talker voice and emotional the where then presented…

Extended findings of a study that found that increasing the salience of perceptually important regions of nonsense word and sentence materials aids speech perception in noise by investigating the robustness of these enhancement techniques in improving consonant intelligibility for a range of different speakers and for groups of listeners with…

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

Investigated three acoustical features of word boundaries between French nouns and adjectives. Found that fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity all appeared to be acoustical correlates of word boundaries. Indicated that the temporal structure of the speech material was the most important cue for the detection of the word boundaries.…

Shows that vowel duration is a cue to voicing of syllable-final consonants. Notes that the effective duration of a vowel apparently extends over all parts of the acoustic signal, including the transitions reflecting the consequences of the coarticulation of vowel and consonant. (Author/RL)

Examines tone perception in Mambila, a Benue-Congo language with four level lexical tones. A categorization experiment was run to determine some of the salient aspects of the perceptual nature of these tones. Results are discussed in light of what is known about universal tendencies of tone systems and the historical development of the Mambila…

Outlines an approach for studying auditory levels in speech perception, focusing on the artificial speech understanding system that is most compatible with the experimental data obtained in speech perception research. (RL)

This paper provides three representative examples that highlight the ways in which procedures can be combined to study interactions across traditional domains of study: segmentation, word learning, and grammar. The first section uses visual familiarization prior to the Headturn Preference Procedure to demonstrate that synchronized visual…

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be…

Augments Michael Studdert-Kennedy's state-of-the-art report on speech perception research (EJ 227 656) with comments on categorical perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli, speech perception in context, the role of prosody, and development/impairments of speech perception. Includes a summary of a discussion on speech perception research. (RL)