Speech Aerodynamics and Phonological Universals

Sensitivity to Phonological Universals: The Case of Stops and Fricatives.

Linguistic evidence suggests that syllables like bdam (with stop-stop clusters) are less preferred than bzam (with stop-fricative combinations). Here, we demonstrate that English speakers manifest similar preferences despite no direct experience with either structure. Experiment 1 elicited syllable count for auditory materials (e.g., does bzam have one syllable or two?); Experiment 2 examined t...

Functional Bases of Phonological Universals: A Connectionist Approach

Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: Evidence from nasal clusters.

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalizing marked structure, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). An account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual 'repairs' to structure...

Phonological universals constrain the processing of nonspeech stimuli.

Domain-specific systems are hypothetically specialized with respect to the outputs they compute and the inputs they allow (Fodor, 1983). Here, we examine whether these 2 conditions for specialization are dissociable. An initial experiment suggests that English speakers could extend a putatively universal phonological restriction to inputs identified as nonspeech. A subsequent comparison of Engl...

Phonological Capabilities and Speech Understanding

In the present article we will review results from a number of studies conducted in our laboratory where the purpose has been to examine phonological processing capabilities in deafened adults and individuals with a severe hearingimpairment, and to relate their phonological processing skills to visual and audio-visual speech understanding performance. The results show that deafened adults and i...