Models of second language acquisition predict that adults are unlikely to learn to produce a non-native vowel very quickly due to their reduced sensitivity to acoustic features not phonological in their native language. Earlier studies show that attention focusing training and articulatory instructions can facilitate learning of non-native speech sounds. We used an instructed listen-and-repeat ...

Perceptual learning is sometimes characterized by rapid improvements in performance within the first hour of training (fast perceptual learning), which may be accompanied by changes in sensory and/or response pathways. Here, we report rapid physiological changes in the human auditory system that coincide with learning during a 1-hour test session in which participants learned to identify two co...

The technique of 306-channel magnetoencephalogaphy (MEG) was used in eight healthy volunteers to test whether silent lip-reading modulates auditory-cortex processing of phonetic sounds. Auditory test stimuli (either Finnish vowel /ae/ or /ø/) were preceded by a 500 ms lag by either another auditory stimulus (/ae/, /ø/ or the second-formant midpoint between /ae/ and /ø/), or silent movie of a pe...

The ability of listeners to identify two simultaneously presented vowels can be improved by introducing a difference in fundamental frequency (F0) between the vowels. We propose an explanation for this phenomenon in the form of a computational model of concurrent sound segregation, which is motivated by neurophysiological evidence of oscillatory firing activity in the auditory cortex and thalam...

It has been found in vowel imitation studies that subjects' responses to steadystate isolated vowels from an acoustic continuum exhibit categorical tendencies: Some adjacent vowels are responded to more similarly than others, and the distribution of formant frequencies in the total set of responses is decidedly nonuniform. The present study investigated whether these tendencies originate in per...

Reduction in tlequency resolving capacity of the auditory system due to spread of masking of frequency cornponents by neighboring frequency components degrades speech perception in cases of sensorineural hearing impairment. We have carried out experimental evaluation of splitting speech into two signals lby using a bank of critical band filters, in order to reduce the effect of spectral masking...

The brain is constantly generating predictions of future sensory input to enable efficient adaptation. In the auditory domain, this applies also to the processing of speech. Here we aimed to determine whether the brain predicts the following segments of speech input on the basis of language-specific phonological rules that concern non-adjacent phonemes. Auditory event-related potentials (ERP) w...

Eight experienced 3M/House cochlear implant users' consonant recognition was evaluated with videotaped vowel-consonant vowel lists presented in auditory implant only (A), visual (V), and auditory-visual (AV) conditions. All subjects' scores were better than chance. Results revealed that the AV scores were significantly better than the V scores, which were better than the A scores. Sequential In...

In an attempt to improve the perception of vowel length contrasts in Japanese by L2 learners (L1 Korean), we compared two different training methods. The first one involved training L2 learners with sets of isolated words contrasting the vowels (Word training), whereas the other training involved presenting same words within sentences (Sentence training). Word training and sentence training bot...