This study examined how discriminability and prototypicality of nonnative phones modulate the amplitude of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential. We hypothesized that if a frequently occurring (standard) stimulus is not prototypical to a listener, a weaker predictive memory trace will be formed and a smaller MMN will be…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Research on native Arabic speakers' perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts has manifested various conclusions. Some studies have revealed that native Arabic speakers experience difficulty in the perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts, where others have concluded that they largely do not experience such difficulty. Due to…

Purpose: This study used perceptual and acoustic measures to examine the time course of speech adaptation after the attachment of electromagnetic sensor coils to the tongue, lips, and jaw. Method: Twenty native English speakers read aloud stimulus sentences before the attachment of the sensors, immediately after attachment, and again 5, 10, 15,…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

Linguistic evidence suggests that syllables like "bdam" (with stop-stop clusters) are less preferred than "bzam" (with stop-fricative combinations). Here, we demonstrate that English speakers manifest similar preferences despite no direct experience with either structure. Experiment 1 elicited syllable count for auditory…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

This study explored the developmental trends and phonetic category formation in bilingual children and adults. Participants included 30 fluent Spanish-English bilingual children, aged 8-11, and bilingual adults, aged 18-40. All completed gating tasks that incorporated code-mixed Spanish-English stimuli. There were significant differences in…

Infants greatly refine their ability to discriminate language sounds by 12 months, yet 14-month-olds appear to confuse similar-sounding novel words. Two explanations could account for this phenomenon: infants initially have incomplete phoneme representations, suggesting developmental discontinuity; or word-learning demands interfere with use of…

Models of speech perception are in general agreement with respect to the major cortical regions involved, but lack precision with regard to localization and lateralization of processing units. To refine these models we conducted two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analyses of the neuroimaging literature on sublexical speech perception.…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to investigate how listener training and the presence of intermediate acoustic cues influence transcription variability for conflicting cue speech stimuli. Method: Twenty listeners with training in transcribing disordered speech, and 26 untrained listeners, were asked to make forced-choice labeling…

Listeners hearing an ambiguous speech sound flexibly adjust their phonetic categories in accordance with lipread information telling what the phoneme should be (recalibration). Here, we tested the stability of lipread-induced recalibration over time. Listeners were exposed to an ambiguous sound halfway between /t/ and /p/ that was dubbed onto a…

The present study examined the perception of Mandarin disyllabic tones by inexperienced American English speakers. Participants heard two naturally-produced Mandarin disyllables, and indicated if the two were the same or different. A small native Mandarin-speaking control group participated as well. All 21 possible Mandarin contrasts where the…

An experiment tests conjectures that right ear advantage (REA) has an auditory origin in competition or interference between acoustically similar stimuli and that feature-sharing effect (FSE) has its origin in assignment of features of phonetically similar stimuli. No effect on the REA for acoustic similarity, and a clear effect of acoustic…

Tested whether listeners' reaction times for monitoring a predetermined phoneme are influenced by phonetic constraints on ordering. Reaction times were significantly shorter for phoneme monitoring in monosyllable-bisyllable sequences than in bisyllable-monosyllable sequences; however, reaction times were not significantly different for high-low vs…