Although many speech perception studies have suggested that long-term memory representations of phonemes induce categorical perception along an acoustic continuum (e.g., voice-onset time; VOT) when identifying speech sounds, other studies have suggested that acoustic information is preserved and that graded responses can be observed in within-category comparisons. Using subjective confidence re...

Previous cross-language research has indicated that some speech contrasts present greater perceptual difficulty for adult non-native listeners than others do. It has been hypothesized that phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic factors contribute to this variability. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate systematically the role of phonemic status and phonetic familiarity in the perception of non...

Infants' speech perception adapts to the phonemic categories of their native language, a process assumed to be driven by the distributional properties of speech. This study investigates whether deep neural networks (DNNs), the current state-of-the-art in distributional feature learning, are capable of learning phoneme-like representations of speech in an unsupervised manner. We trained DNNs wit...

The phonemic priming effect may reflect the hidden dynamics of spoken word perception and has thus been a key topic of recent research. This investigation compared phonemic and phonetic priming (cf. Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992), using signal detection methods. Although these methods were intended to provide separate indices of sensitivity and bias changes, the results were more co...

We investigate the perception of phonemic vowel quantity contrast and its relation to word stress and vowel quality in Slovak, and fill the gap of missing experimental perception data for this language. We observe that both prosodicallydriven undershoot of unstressed vowels and the functional load affect the perception of quantity contrast. Vowel quality plays some role in quantity identificati...

This study investigates whether L2 learners can be trained to make better use of phonetic information from visual cues in their perception of a novel phonemic contrast. It also evaluates the impact of audiovisual perceptual training on the learners pronunciation of a novel contrast. The use of visual cues for speech perception was evaluated for two English phonemic contrasts: the /v/–/b/–/p/ la...

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 through feedback, or post-perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically-restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following...

The term nasality refers to the timbre of the nasal phonemes. It is also used to express the quality of sound that characterises some speakers. In this paper, we propose to classify nasality in natural speech into four types: phonemic nasality, nasality in assimilation, incidental nasality in the production of voiced plosives, and nasality associated with speaker individuality. Speech sounds re...