The phonological vowel and consonant length distinctions in languages such as Hungarian may provide a constraint on the degree to which prosodic structure can influence speech segment duration. Here we show that, like many other languages, Hungarian does mark prosodic structure with durational variation, in particular, utterance-final lengthening. There is an influence of phonological vowel len...

Yuhuan Wu Chinese deletes non-final lexical tones within a small post-lexical tone domain, except HL if its syllable begins with a sonorant consonant. The explanation of this phonological specification lies in the number of tone contrasts in the location concerned (H, L, HL, ML and LH), which is higher than in syllables with a voiceless obstruent or zero onset (H, HL, LH) or in syllables beginn...

Previous work (Tuller & Kelso, 1990) reported a change in syllable affiliation, which was reflected by a change in the relative phase, of glottal and lip movements, as the rate of speaking a VC syllable increased. That is /ip#ip#.../ becomes /pi#pi#.../ as speaking rate is systematically increased. Here we report a change in the syllable affiliation of part of a final consonant cluster; /opt#op...

Listeners flexibly recalibrate the perceptual categorization of sounds in response to speakers’ unusual pronunciation variants. Recent studies have shown that generalization of this recalibration can inform us about the nature of prelexical units used for speech perception. The present study tested whether this generalization is sensitive to phonetic or phonological properties of speech. Using ...

This preliminary study aims at investigating the production and perception of the English nasals /m/ and /n/ in word-final position by a group of 10 intermediate Brazilian EFL learners. Production data was collected by means of a Sentence Reading Test considering preceding vowel as phonological context. Perception was assessed by means of an identification test contrasting native-like vs. nonna...

One characteristic of African American vernacular English (AAVE) is final obstruent devoicing, where the final consonant of a word like rigid is pronounced more like /t/ than /d/. To determine whether this dialect characteristic influences adults' spelling, African American and White college students spelled words such as rigid and ballot, pronounced by either a speaker of their own dialect or ...

Previous work on the acquisition of consonant clusters points to a tendency for word-final clusters to be acquired before word-initial clusters (Templin, 1957; Lleó & Prinz, 1996; Levelt, Schiller & Levelt, 2000). This paper evaluates possible structural, morphological, frequency-based, and articulatory explanations for this asymmetry using a picture identification task with 12 English-speaking...

The most common complaint of older hearing impaired (OHI) listeners is difficulty understanding speech in the presence of noise. However, tests of consonant-identification and sentence reception threshold (SeRT) provide different perspectives on the magnitude of impairment. Here we quantified speech perception difficulties in 24 OHI listeners in unaided and aided conditions by analyzing (1) con...