Describes an investigation of the notion that sentence perception involves holding single clauses or propositions in a temporary buffer. Concludes that this notion is false and that, instead, more recently presented or important material may become more accessible in memory as presentation of the sentence proceeds. (Author/SED)

When two Japanese adults named colors written in Kanji, a logographic orthography, and in Kana, a syllabary, the latency to vocalization was consistently less for Kana. This superiority of Kana is attributed to the closer relation of Kana to phonology and, therefore, to speech. (Author/RL)

Indicates that the direction of articulatory substitution for 13 consonants is identical to the direction of auditory perceptual substitution defined by shifts of phonological features. (Author/RL)

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language…

This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The…

Investigates the availability of surface representations for the interpretation of verb-phrase ellipsis. Results show that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence and that this can not be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents. (MM)

Reports that when hearing-impaired children imitated nonsense words containing bilabial consonants, the rank order of correct responses and total choices was "b" (highest), "m," and "p" (lowest). The data are discussed in terms of auditory-visual perceptions of the hearing impaired and the order of the sounds in normal-hearing children. (Author/RL)

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

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…

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

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…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

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…

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Analyzes the production and perception of illocutionary forms. Using a semantic neutralization procedure, the performance of children (5, 7, and 9 years old) and adults was compared in two experiments focusing on prosodic representations in production and perception tasks. (Author/JL)