MMN to phonetic contrasts along different feature dimensions

Phonetic and Other Influences on Voicing Contrasts

What factors influence how languages use voicing and aspiration? Some influences are phonetic: a salient auditory boundary between short and long lag VOT values favors the perception of aspiration contrasts, while a clear gestural distinction favors the production of voicing contrasts. But even within a language, speakers differ in how they produce contrasts. Examination of speaker variation in...

Distinctive features and phonetic dimensions

Statistical Cues Facilitate Infants’ Discrimination of Difficult Phonetic Contrasts

Perhaps the best-known fact about developmental speech perception is that infants are remarkably adept at discriminating phonetic contrasts. In early infancy, this ability is unaffected by language environment, resulting in the surprising fact that infants can discriminate certain foreign contrasts that their parents cannot. For example, infants from English-speaking homes can hear the differen...

Automatic and controlled processing of acoustic and phonetic contrasts.

Changes in the temporal properties of the speech signal provide important cues for phoneme identification. An impairment or inability to detect such changes may adversely affect one's ability to understand spoken speech. The difference in meaning between the Finnish words tuli (fire) and tuuli (wind), for example, lies in the difference between the duration of the vowel /u/. Detecting changes i...

Acquisition of Foreign Phonetic Contrasts Mediated by White Matter Connectivity

Brain imaging studies have shown that both the frontal and the parietal-temporal cortical areas are engaged during speech comprehension. These areas have been theorized to be components (nodes) of a language network. However, research on the intriguing role played by white matter connectivity (connections between nodes) is relatively sparse. In this study, we investigated such neuroanatomical b...