Acoustic and perceptual effects of emphasis, a secondary articulation in the posterior vocal tract, were investigated in Urban Jordanian Arabic. Twelve speakers of Jordanian Arabic recorded both consonants and vowels of monosyllabic minimal CVC pairs containing plain or emphatic consonants in initial and final position to investigate the extent of coarticulatory effects of emphasis. In general,...

In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem ‘augments’ is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) “Principle of Metrical Coherence” and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic appli...

Use of precise consonantal information while learning new words has been established for onset consonants in previous studies, which showed that infants as young as 16 to 20 months of age can simultaneously learn two new words that differ only by a syllable-initial consonant (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005; Nazzi & New, 2007; Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, 2002). However, there is no sys...

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1-1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not 0;8 are able to segment vowel-initial words tha...

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) produces deficits in speech comprehension in noise that primarily are due to impairments in identifying consonants. Here, w e describe the California Syllable Test (CaST) that quant ifies the ident ification of common American English consonants. In experiment I, 16 young sub jects wi th normal hearing iden tified 720 consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syll ables ...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to explore whether word-initial onset awareness is acquired before phoneme awareness and whether onset complexity influences performance on identification tasks. In addition, the relationship between onset and phoneme awareness and letter knowledge was investigated. METHOD In this study, 22 monolingual German-speaking preschool children aged 5;00-5;11 were tested. Onset...

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been a...

In tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, a lexical tone carries semantic information and is preferentially processed in the left brain hemisphere of native speakers as revealed by the functional MRI or positron emission tomography studies, which likely measure the temporally aggregated neural events including those at an attentive stage of auditory processing. Here, we demonstrate that earl...

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn po...

Investigations have been made on the perceptual and acoustic properties of individual phonemes in continuous speech for different speaking rate. Fifteen short sentences spoken by four male speakers have been used as the test material. Each speaker has been asked to pronounce the sentences with three different rates: normal, first and slow. For perceptual experiment, individual CV-syllables have...