Purpose: Phonemic awareness has been identified as a critical area of early literacy instruction. Evidence suggests that educators may not have sufficient phonemic awareness skill to provide effective phonemic awareness instruction. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) demonstrate strong phonemic awareness skill relative to other educators (Spencer, Schuele, Guillot, & Lee, 2008). This study sou...

The present paper investigated the perception of four Punjabi liquids /ɾ ɽ l ɭ/ and two stops /d ɖ/ by Japanese listeners. It has been reported that Japanese listeners have difficulty in perceiving the two-way liquid contrast of English because Japanese has only one liquid phoneme. Japanese /r/ has, in fact, a rich allophonic inventory. However, no detailed perception studies have been conducte...

This paper proposes a scheme of using F0 contours of vowel nuclei to discriminate Chinese lexical tones. The authors suggest that the F0 contour fragment of a vowel nucleus of a syllable contributes most to tone perception of the syllable. To correlate the F0 contour with the phonemic components of a syllable, a tone-based syllabic structure is also proposed. Tone recognition experiments on a s...

PURPOSE Educators rely on sufficient knowledge and skill to provide effective phonemic awareness instruction, an important component of early literacy instruction, particularly for children who experience difficulty learning to read. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare the phonemic awareness skill of several groups of educators, including speech-language pathologists (SLPs; n ...

This paper demonstrates that a low-level, linear description of the response properties of auditory neurons can exhibit some of the high-level properties of the categorical perception of human speech. In particular, it is shown that the non-linearities observed in the human perception of speech sounds which span a categorical boundaries can be understood as arising rather naturally from a low-l...

In this study, the nature of speech perception of native Mandarin Chinese was compared with that of American English speakers, using synthetic visual and auditory continua (from /ba/ to /da/) in an expanded factorial design. In Experiment 1, speakers identified synthetic unimodal and bimodal speech syllables as either /ba/ or /da/. In Experiment 2, Mandarin speakers were given nine possible res...

• We studied the role of sound symbolism on constructing healthy food names. Phonemic sounds with higher (vs. lower) frequencies are perceived to be healthier. Higher frequency change health perception savoury food. The is not observed in sweet interest has grown rapidly amongst both consumers and manufacturers recent years. However, which foods should considered sometimes ambiguous. Identifyin...

This paper explores the relationship between the acoustic duration of phonemic sequences and their frequencies of occurrence. The data were obtained from large (sub)corpora of spontaneous speech in Dutch, English, German, and Italian. Acoustic duration of an n-phone is shown to codetermine the n-phone's frequency of use, such that languages preferentially use diphones and triphones that are nei...

This acoustic study has investigated contextual tonal variations in 125 disyllabic words produced by six native speakers of Nanjing Chinese, with five phonemic tones. Three types of tonal variation were observed in the data: neutralizing sandhi, nonneutralizing sandhi and tonal coarticulation. Comparison between the three types of tonal variation suggests that tone sandhi may be rooted in phone...