It is well-known that children are born with the perceptual ability to discriminate not only native phonetic contrasts, but also non-native ones. However, recent research suggests that not all contrasts are equally discriminable. Children cannot discriminate some acoustically similar phonetic contrasts early in infancy. They need a certain period of exposure with these contrasts to learn to dis...

Auditory speech is difficult to discern in degraded listening conditions, however the addition of visual speech can improve perception. The Perceptual Assimilation Model [1] suggests that non-native contrasts involving a native phonological difference (two-category assimilation) should be discriminated more accurately than those involving a phonetic goodness-offit difference (category-goodness ...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded from 10 young adults with normal hearing using naturally produced speech contrasts. Consonant-place and vowel-height contrasts were examined in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables by pairing either the consonant /t/ or /p/ with the vowel /I/ or /E/. Vowel-height was also examined as a pseudovowel; one cycle of the vowel segment of a CV was extracted and rep...

Discriminating between certain non-native contrasts can be difficult. The Perceptual Assimilation Model [1] predicts that when two non-native phones are assimilated to the same native language category, as equally good or poor versions, discrimination should be poor (a single-category assimilation). However, it is not known to what extent visual and/or clearly articulated speech might assist cr...

Inferences about the evolution of continuous traits based on reconstruction of ancestral states have often been considered more error-prone than analysis of independent contrasts. Here we show that both methods in fact yield identical estimators for the correlation coefficient and regression gradient of correlated traits, indicating that reconstructed ancestral states are a valid source of info...

The contrasts of limb faculae at various heliocentric angles are observed in three continuum windows largely free of absorption lines. Observations with interference filters show a contrast decrease with wavelength which is not found when using an ‘UBF’ to select the shortest continuum window. Limb faculae in speckle-reconstructed images yield contrasts being typically 1.2 times higher than tho...

Group theory and semigroup theory have developed in somewhat different directions in the past several decades. While Cayley’s theorem enables us to view groups as groups of permutations of some set, the analogous result in semigroup theory represents semigroups as semigroups of functions from a set to itself. Of course both group theory and semigroup theory have developed significantly beyond t...

This paper reports on the results of an investigation of the fortis-lenis contrast in stops and the complementary quantity contrast in Norwegian and compares these same contrasts in two dialects of Swedish. The data show that in initial position one series of stops has consistently long-lag Voice Onset Time (VOT) and this series is also voiceless in post-vocalic position, often with some preasp...

Speech and music performance are two important systems for interhuman communication by means of acoustic signals. These signals must be adapted to the human perceptual and cognitive systems. Hence a comparitive analysis of speech and music performances is likely to shed light on these systems, particularly regarding basic requirements for acoustic communication. Two computer programs are compar...

Following the pioneering work of Felsenstein and Garland, phylogeneticists have been using regression through the origin to analyze comparative data using independent contrasts. The reason why regression through the origin must be used with such data was revisited. The demonstration led to the formulation of a permutation test for the coefficient of determination and the regression coefficient ...