The lexicons of natural language can be characterized as a network of words, where each word is linked to phonologically similar words. These networks are called phonological neighbourhood networks (PNNs). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which observed properties of these networks are mathematical consequences of the definition of PNNs, consequences of linguistic restrictions on wha...

We investigated how English rhythmic patterns develop in the course of first language acquisition by children between four and twelve years. We have empirically confirmed that rhythm becomes increasingly more stress-timed as acquisition progresses, which is revealed by higher durational variability of syllables, vocalic sequences and consonantal clusters in speech delivered by older children co...

Japanese infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate three nonsense words with different phonotactic status: canonical keetsu, noncanonical but possible keets, and noncanonical and impossible keet. The results showed that 12 and 18 months olds discriminate the keets/keetsu pair, but infants in all age groups fail to discriminate the keets/keet pair. ...

Speakers show sensitivity to the sound patterns possible in their language (phonotactics patterns). These patterns can involve specific sound sequences (e.g. bb) or more general classes of sequences (e.g. two identical consonants). In some bottom-up models of phonotactic learning, generalizations can only be formed once some of their specific instantiations have been acquired. To test this assu...

The contrastive/noncontrastive model developed by Seymour and Seymour (1977) can be applied to the development of a dialect-sensitive phonological assessment that uses a single scoring and test format, regardless of a child's dialect. Through extensive field research, stimulus items were found that respect the phonotactics of African American English (AAE) (i.e., no targets are final consonants...

This paper presents a description of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory submissions to the 2005 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE05). As was true in 2003, the 2005 submissions were combinations of core cepstral and phonotactic recognizers whose outputs were fused to generate final scores. For the 2005 evaluation, Lincoln Laboratory had five submissions built upon fused combinations of six core ...

Research on perceptual epenthesis in Japanese has revealed high back [ɯ] to be the vowel commonly perceived in illicit consonant sequences. However, loanword studies suggest that there are three epenthetic vowels, which reflect phonotactic restrictions on certain consonant + vowel sequences. Expanding previous perception studies, this paper investigates the extent to which perceptual epenthesis...

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions ...

Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotactic restriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed that an adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection between phonotactics and alternations, there is however, no psycholinguistic evidence that speakers actually do use a single mechanism for them both. In...

Infants face the difficult problem of segmenting continuous speech into words without the benefit of a fully developed lexicon. Several sources of information in speech might help infants solve this problem, including prosody, semantic correlations and phonotactics. Research to date has focused on determining to which of these sources infants might be sensitive, but little work has been done to...