There is a well-known rule of Russian whereby /i/ is said to be realized as [Y] after non-palatalized consonants. Somewhat less well-known is another allophonic rule of Russian whereby only [i], and not [Y], can follow velars within a morphological word. This latter rule came about due to a sound change in East Slavic called postvelar fronting here: kY > ki (and similarly for the other velars)....

The alveolar lateral of the Viennese dialect undergoes several allophonic processes, among these, vocalization and velarization are the most prominent ones. In the current contribution, we will concentrate on the sociolinguistic aspects which disturb the complementary distribution of the alveolar and the velarized lateral and give rise to a possible reversal of the velarization process which st...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Learning non-native contrasts: Limits of the statistical training Recently, studies showed that distributional information contained in the speech signal can contribute to the acquisition of phoneme categories. Indeed, exposition to bimodal distributions leads to an improvement of phoneme di...

Prosodically-conditioned reduction of /t/ and /d/ is examined in both English and Spanish using real-time magnetic resonance imaging. Results indicate that in both languages, the displacement of all three articulators used to create tongue tip closure (tongue tip, tongue body, and jaw) is conditioned by the duration of the movement. This suggests that reduction is a gradient rather than categor...

Although syllable-based accounts of /l/-darkening in English state that light [l] occurs in onsets (e.g. ‘leap’) and a dark [ë] in codas (e.g. ‘peel’), analyses of the process from several phonetic studies have led to some arguing against an allophonic distinction altogether, stating that the difference between light and dark variants is merely two extremes of one continuum. The current paper a...

Models of the acquisition of word segmentation are typically evaluated using phonemically transcribed corpora. Accordingly, they implicitly assume that children know how to undo phonetic variation when they learn to extract words from speech. Moreover, whereas models of language acquisition should perform similarly across languages, evaluation is often limited to English samples. Using child-di...

Phonetic transcriptions are often manually encoded in a pronunciation lexicon. This process is time consuming and requires linguistic expertise. Moreover, it is very difficult to maintain consistency. To handle these problems, we present a model that produces Korean pronunciation variants based on morphophonological analysis. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korea...

The resources necessary to produce Automatic Speech Recognition systems for a new language are considerable, and for many languages these resources are not available. This emphasizes the need for the development of generic techniques which overcome this data shortage. Indonesian is one language which suffers from this problem and whose population and importance suggest it could benefit from spe...

Recent experimental research in developmental phonology confinns that within their first year, infants demonstrate language-sp~ific patterns of speech perception discrimination. Data, however, outpaces theory in this line of research. For wtaile it is clear that this transition is related to the particular linguistic environment of the infant, it remains obscure whether mere acoustic exposure t...

Two experiments investigated sensitivity to dialect-specific subphonemic information in spoken word recognition, and the relationship with individuals’ production of the same dialect-specific cues. The phenomenon evaluated was raising of /aj/ before voiceless consonants in Canadian English. In the first experiment, eye movement patterns during on-line speech comprehension indicated that listene...