The world's languages display important differences in their rhythmic organization; most particularly, different languages seem to privilege different phonological units (mora, syllable, or stress foot) as their basic rhythmic unit. There is now considerable evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language…

Children's first-language perception base takes shape gradually from birth onwards. Empirical research has confirmed that children may continue to fall short of age-based expectations in their speech perception. The purpose of this study was to assess the contribution of various perception processes in both reading and learning disabled children.…

This article describes an experiment in which the following hypothesis was tested and supported: that tension serves to reinforce the phoneme's articulatory characteristic, whether it be closure or openness; and that audibility interferes with perception of tension. (Text is in French.) (AM)

In an investigation using auditory evoked responses (AERs) to compare strongly left- and strongly right-handed adults in their hemispheric processing of speech materials, it was anticipated that AERs would reflect a bilateralization in the left-handed group of subjects and marked hemispheric differences in the right-handed group. In addition, the…

Children and adults participated in two speech perception experiments in which they listened to recorded consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words in random order and resPonded by indicating which number of a word-pair they had heard. Some but not all stimuli that were intended to induce perceptual cross-over were successful in getting subjects to…

This study explored three aspects of the 2-month-old's perception of multisyllabic utterances. Questions addressed were: (1) Do infants perceive phonetic contrasts occurring either in the initial (Bada-Gada) or medial (Daba-Daga) positions of multisyllabic utterances; (2) Are infants more likely to perceive these contrasts in stressed as opposed…

The paper discusses some important distinctions between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. It is the authors' contention that the distinction between the two must be maintained in experimental linguistics, or else inadequate models result. Three experiments are described. In the first, subjects pronounce nonsense words and the…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

Assesses the relationship between production deficits and speech perception abilities. A categorical perception paradigm was administered to a group of communication disordered children and to a matched control group. Group results are tentatively interpreted as showing a moderate perceptual deficit in the communication disordered children of this…

This study compared the lexical mapping (acoustic-phonetic analysis) stage of auditory word recognition in 21 children (mean age 8 years 9 months) with specific language impairments (SLI) with children matched for either chronological age or vocabulary. The SLI children performed comparably to control groups on all dependent measures related to…

This study examined Australian English (AE) and Thai-English bilingual (TE) speakers' ability to perceive word-final stops in their native and non-native languages. In the perception experiment, the TE listeners were able to discriminate stop contrasts differing only in place of articulation (/p/-/t/, /p/-/k/, /t/-/k/) in both English and Thai…

Acoustic properties of retroflex consonants were determined and interpreted in terms of acoustic theory. The results are considered in relation to a quantal theory, auditory property detectors, and theoretical notions of markedness. (Author/TL)