Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

To understand spoken language, listeners combine acoustic-phonetic input with expectations derived from context (Dahan & Magnuson, 2006). Eye-tracking studies on semantic context have demonstrated that the activation levels of competing lexical candidates depend on the relative strengths of the bottom-up input and top-down expectations (cf.…

Infants rapidly learn language in their home environments. Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants' ability to process the building blocks of speech (i.e., phonetic information) develops quickly, and this ability predicts later language development. Typically, developing infants in a monolingual language environment rapidly tune in to the phonetic…

Purpose: This study implemented a pretest-intervention-posttest design to examine whether multiple-talker identification training enhanced phonetic perception of the /ba/-/da/ and /wa/-/ja/ contrasts in adult listeners who were deafened postlingually and have cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Nine CI recipients completed 8 hours of identification…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

Recent research reveals that pronunciation converges in verbal interaction (Babel, 2012), but this varies between speakers (Pardo, 2006). Based on dynamical principles I predict differences in bilinguals' accommodation towards English voice-onset-time (VOT). VOT is a phase relation between two articulatory gestures measuring the time between oral…

Purpose: Relative to normally hearing (NH) peers, the speech of children with cochlear implants (CIs) has been found to have deviations such as a high fundamental frequency, elevated jitter and shimmer, and inadequate intonation. However, two important dimensions of prosody (temporal and spectral) have not been systematically investigated. Given…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

Second language (L2) phonological acquisition involves learning novel target-language sounds, variable forms of sounds that arise in different phonological contexts, and any phonotactic constraints that govern their appearance. Interlanguage (IL) grammars must adapt to represent sounds and constraints that are novel to the native language (L1)…

Language experience shapes infants' abilities to process speech sounds, with universal phonetic discrimination abilities narrowing in the second half of the first year. Brain measures reveal a corresponding change in neural discrimination as the infant brain becomes selectively sensitive to its native language(s). Whether and how bilingual…

Adult Japanese speakers often experience difficulty learning English /r/-/l/. Previous research has reported the effectiveness of using perception-based high-variability identification training with natural speech stimuli on improving Japanese speakers' perception and production of /r/-/l/. Recent studies have also shown the effectiveness of using…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl,…

In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situations, it is important for educators to improve learners' sound recognition skill due to the variation of English found in the world. Furthermore, perceptual skill is a foundation leading to intelligibility in production. This study examined the effects of using High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT)…

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native "learners" are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native…