Are there acoustic invariants that mediate the perception of phonemes? If there were, they might be shared by a number of languages. But this acoustic-phonemic relationship does not occur in a simple way for any of the languages that have been examined. Has, then, such an approach to speech perception been abandoned? Not entirely; some theorists argue that there are invariant acoustic propertie...

Under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be synthesized by the brain and clearly heard. This illusory phenomenon, known as the phonemic restoration effect, reveals the sophisticated capability of the brain underlying robust speech perception in noisy situations often encountered in daily life. In this article, basic aspects of the phonemic restoration effect ar...

Amplitude envelope co-varies with F0 in Mandarin lexical tones. It can cue lexical tone perception in a tone language such as Mandarin which uses different pitch contours for phonemic contrasts. The current study investigated whether amplitude envelope could also aid the perception of lexical tones in a language such as Cantonese which uses both pitch contour and relative pitch height for phone...

Innate auditory sensitivities and familiarity with the sounds of language give rise to clear influences of phonemic categories on adult perception of speech. With few exceptions, current models endorse highly left-hemisphere-lateralized mechanisms responsible for the influence of phonemic category on speech perception, based primarily on results from functional imaging and brain-lesion studies....

In speech perception, children give particular patterns of weight to different acoustic cues (their cue weighting). These patterns appear to change with increased linguistic experience. Previous speech perception research has found a positive correlation between more analytical cue weighting strategies and the ability to consciously think about and manipulate segment-sized units (phonemic aware...

Amplitude envelope co-varies with F0 in Mandarin lexical tones. It can cue lexical tone perception in a tone language such as Mandarin which uses different pitch contours for phonemic contrasts. The current study investigated whether amplitude envelope could also aid the perception of lexical tones in a language such as Cantonese which uses both pitch contour and relative pitch height for phone...

Discriminiationi of synthetic speech sounds was studied in 1- and 4-month-old infants. The speech sounds varied along an acoustic dimension previously shown to cue phonemic distinctions among the voiced and voiceless stop consonants in adults. Discriminability was measured by an increase in conditioned response rate to a second speech sound after habituation to the first speech sound. Recovery ...

The question of when and how bottom-up input is integrated with top-down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken-word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception thr...

Phonological awareness and phoneme identification tasks were administered to dyslexic children and both chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL) comparison groups. Dyslexic children showed less sharply defined categorical perception of a bath-path continuum varying voice onset time when compared to the CA but not the RL group. The dyslexic children were divided into two subgroups based on ...