Perception studies have shown similarities between humans and other animals in a wide array of language-related processes. However, the components of language that make it uniquely human have not been fully identified. Here we show that nonhuman animals extract rules over speech sequences that are difficult for humans. Specifically, animals easily…

Two experiments examining the subsyllabic division behaviors of Chinese-speaking children learning English as a foreign language (EFL) are reported. In Experiment 1, target phonemes of monosyllabic English nonwords were varied in phonotactic context (e.g., (C)VC vs. (C)CVC), marginality (e.g., (C)CVC vs. C(C)VC), and/or position (e.g., (C)VC vs.…

Recent research has suggested consonants and vowels serve different roles during language processing. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants but not over vowels, simple structural generalizations are easily made over vowels but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the origins of this asymmetry are unknown. Here we…

The aim of this study was to determine if two dimensions of song, the phonological part of lyrics and the melodic part of tunes, are processed in an independent or integrated way. In a series of five experiments, musically untrained participants classified bi-syllabic nonwords sung on two-tone melodic intervals. Their response had to be based on…

Three experiments examined how the sounds of words are represented in plans for speech production. The sequential cuing model accounts for the basic findings of all three experiments. (DR)

First graders listened to the pronunciation of single syllable nonsense words and were asked to spell the words. Results showed that, for nonsense words of the form consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant, in which the consonant following the vowel was a nasal or a liquid, children often omitted the second consonant in their spelling. (BC)

The present study explores the issue of the use of phonetic specificity in the process of learning new words at 20 months of age. The procedure used follows Nazzi and Gopnik [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2001). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: When does language become a tool for categorization? "Cognition," 80, B11-B20].…