Previous research on speech perception in both adults and infants has supported the view that consonants are perceived categorically; that is, listeners are relatively insensitive to variation below the level of the phoneme. More recent work, on the other hand, has shown adults to be systematically sensitive to within category variation [McMurray,…

Purpose: Investigate training-related changes in acoustic-phonetic representation of consonants produced by a text-to-speech (TTS) computer speech synthesizer. Method: Forty-eight adult listeners were trained to better recognize words produced by a TTS system. Nine additional untrained participants served as controls. Before and after training,…

Twenty-one normally developing 3-year-old children were tested on two approximate consonant contrasts, "rake-lake" and "wake-rake," and a control contrast, "wake-bake." The children showed very accurate perceptions of minimal pairs. Children who did not yet articulate "r" or "l" appropriately showed somewhat less consistent perception than…

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position)…

A study examined what trained phoneticians do when they are presented with a transcription task to carry out without any knowledge of the dialect they are listening to and without any explicit phonological theory as a point of departure. The "best" tokens of three categories of potential assimilation (full, partial, and zero alveolar)…

The study comparing perceptual judgments of speech disfluency by 20 mothers of either stuttering or normally fluent children found no appreciable differences between groups in their judgments. Both groups of mothers most frequently judged sound/syllable repetitions to be stuttered, followed by whole-word repetitions and broken words. (Author/DB)

We examined the effect of perceptual training on a well-established hemispheric asymmetry in speech processing. Eighteen listeners were trained to use a within-category difference in voice onset time (VOT) to cue talker identity. Successful learners (n = 8) showed faster response times for stimuli presented only to the left ear than for those…

Young infants discriminate both native and nonnative phonetic contrasts, but 10- to 12-month-olds and adults fail to discriminate some nonnative contrasts. To explain this, Best, McRoberts, and Sithole (1988) hypothesized that at the age of 10-12 months, a phonological influence begins by means of which nonnative sounds are assimilated to native…

Examines the relationship between illusory changes of repeated words (verbal transformations) and illusory presence of phonemes replaced by noise (phonemic restorations); paper presented at the 82nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Denver, Colorado, October 1971, and supported in part by a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate…

Notes that in phonetic categorization, listeners hear a range of speech sounds forming a continuum of ambiguous sounds between two endpoints and are required to identify the sounds as one or other of the endpoints. Points out that this task has been used in phonetics and in psycholinguistics to study categorical perception, selective adaptation,…

Assessed perception of phonemic contrast based on voice onset time (VOT) and a nonspeech analog of VOT contrast among children and adolescents with reading disability (RD), ADHD, RD and AHDH, or no impairment. Found that RD children had difficulty processing speech and nonspeech stimuli containing similar auditory temporal cues. Phoneme perception…

Infants' early phonetic perception is hypothesized to play an important role in language development. Previous studies have not assessed this potential link in the first 2 years of life. In this study, speech discrimination was measured in 6-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn task. At 13, 16, and 24 months of age, language development…

This test, conducted to prove that closed vowels can be heard in fricative utterances as open vowels in explosive utterances, gives further evidence for the closing action of constrictives and the opening action of occlusives. It also reveals a possible articulatory and auditive convergence between consonants and vowels. (Text is in French.)…

IN THE FIRST PART OF THIS STUDY, A SET OF MEANINGLESS SENTENCES USING ONLY THE SYLLABLE "PA" BUT IMITATING THE INTONATIONAL CONTOUR OF THE SENTENCE "IL VIENDRA ME VOIR DEMAIN MATIN A SEPT HEURES" WERE USED TO PROVIDE SYLLABLES TO BUILD UP 12 SEMI-ARTIFICIAL NONSENSE WORDS. THIRTY-TWO NATIVE SPEAKERS WERE REQUESTED TO (1) SAY WHICH WAS THE ACCENTED…

Research supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the University of Texas at Austin. (RS)