Recent work has shown that by 11 months, infants process sounds differently depending on whether they are in an allophonic relationship in the infants' ambient language (i.e., nasal and oral vowels in American English) or a phonemic one (i.e., nasal and oral vowels in Quebec French; Seidl et al., 2009). Previous experimental work suggests that adults' perceptual similarity and lexical access is...

IT is only during recent years that speech therapy has become known, although for many years the treatment of speech disorders has been carried out by persons interested in the subject, and it is they who have laid the foundations of and built up what is now a recognised profession. Very often the work of an elocutionist is confused with that of a speech therapist, but there is little similarit...

Spoonerisms are defined as involuntary rearrangements of elements in the serial order of speech, as when waste the term is produced as taste the werm. An analysis of 124 Spoonerisms in the natural speech of Germans showed that: 1. Identical phonemes usually preceded (or followed) the reversed phonemes. 2. Reversals preceding identical phonemes were as common as reversals following identical pho...

Properties of ASL The idea that sign languages are not a concatenation of universally understood pantomimes or concrete gestures has been hard to unroot. In fact, just as there are and Computational Sciences many spoken languages, there are many unique and Georgetown University different signed languages. Recent advances in linguis-Washington, DC 20007 tics have revealed that sign languages suc...

A letter-to-phone conversion scheme is proposed for Portuguese which excludes representation of allophonic detail. Phonetically unstable segments are treated as archisegments, their articulatory weakness being analyzed in terms of feature underspecification. Besides solving classical problems of allophony and allomorphy, this analysis provides an efficient principle for building a unit inventor...

In the article “Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals” Barlow (2014) presents production data of /l/ from two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals, who differ on age of acquisition of English (before 5 years or after 6 years of age). Barlow’s contribution is a welcome addition to the relatively understudied field of allophone acquisition by second language learners. In ...

Starting from spontaneous speech data of the Kiel Corpus, reduction patterns of function words are described, which also incorporate more global articulator-y prosodies, such as nasality, labiality and glottalization. The results of 4 perceptual experiments support the hypothesis that these long components of speech production are mapped onto perception. The discussion is also a contribution to...

It has been shown on several occasions that speech perception in a second language (L2) is often tainted by the phonetic and phonological structures of a listener’s native language (L1). As languages vary in their phonological inventories, listeners often have to develop new phonological categories during acquisition in order to recognize words and phonemes in their L2. Recent evidence on the p...

1 . Introduction In this paper I examine crosslinguistic variation in nasal harmony. Three kinds of segment behavior are observed: target segments become nasalized in nasal harmony (/na/ → [na)]), blocking or opaque segments remain oral and block nasal spreading (/nata/ → [na) ta]), and transparent segments remain oral and do not block nasal spreading (/nata/ → [na) ta) ]). The membership of th...

A number of recent studies have examined the effects of phonological variation on the perception of speech. These studies show that both the lexical representations of words and the mechanisms of lexical access are organized so that natural, systematic variation is tolerated by the perceptual system, while a general intolerance of random deviation is maintained. Lexical abstraction distinguishe...