Visual responses are known to depend on stimulus contrast and not simply on the absolute levels of retinal illumination. Here, we have determined the contrasts that mammalian retinal ganglion cells and lateral geniculate neurones (LGN) are likely to encounter in real world scenes. Local contrasts were calculated in 135 calibrated images of a variety of real world scenes using contrast operators...

The present paper reports on the findings and conclusions of an experimental study that investigated the perception of Scottish English /i/-/I/ by Spanish speakers. The conclusions suggest that 1) L2 speakers can learn to identify and discriminate a new contrast, 2) these speakers may also learn to signal a new contrast using an acoustic cue that is secondary for the L1 perception of the same c...

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...

We examined the perception of Italian (IT) and Japanese (JP) consonant length contrasts (singleton vs geminate) in two groups of listeners: native speakers of IT and Australian English (OZ). Our preliminary results suggest that the IT listeners’ experience with singleton/geminate contrasts was more beneficial than the OZ listeners’ experience with vowel length contrasts in processing JP singlet...