Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental representation and neural processing of lexical t...

This event-related potential (ERP) study examines the influence of dialectal competence differences (merged vs. unmerged dialect group) on cross-dialectal comprehension between Southern German dialects. It focuses on the question as to whether certain dialect phonemes (/[Formula: see text]/, /[Formula: see text]/), which are attributed to different lexemes in two dialect areas (Central Bavarian...

Disorders of categorical perception has been put forward as a new account of phonological deficit in dyslexia (Serniclaes, W., Sprenger-Charolles, L., Carre, R. and Demonet, J.F., 2001. Perceptual discrimination of speech sounds in developmental dyslexia. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 44, 384-399.) so that dyslexic subjects tend to discriminate phoneme instances within a given phonemic category ra...

Eight experiments tested the hypothesis that infants' word segmentation abilities are reducible to familiar sound-pattern parsing regardless of actual word boundaries. This hypothesis was disconfirmed in experiments using the headturn preference procedure: 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word (e.g., dice) from passages containing the corresponding phonemic p...

The conversion of orthographic text into a phonemic form may itself comprise several processes i n series, for instance, formatting t e x t to expand a b b r e v i a t i o n s and n o n a l p h a b e t i c e x p r e s s i o n s , p a r s i n g and word c l a s s d e t e r m i n a t i o n , segmenta l p h o n e m i c i z a t i o n of words, word and clause level stress assignment, word internal ...

The present study investigates the effects of prosodic boundary on the acoustic realization of allophonic Mandarin lexical tone creak. Speech of twenty speakers from Mandarin Call Home corpus was analyzed. Results show that stronger creaky voice occurs more often at the end of an utterance than the end of an intermediary phrase, and is least likely to occur phrase medially. The observed creak i...