This paper presents findings on VOT variability in voiced and voiceless plosives produced by 159 speakers from four locations straddling the English-Scottish border. The analysis reveals key effects of both social and phonetic factors, highlighting the importance of both in accounting for variability.

The present study examines how Swiss German learners cope with the contrast between voiced and unvoiced obstruents in L2 French. The feature [±voice]) is not exploited in Swiss German dialects, where pairs of obstruents sharing the same place and manner of articulation are basically differentiated in terms of longer or shorter duration (i.e., the feature [±tense]). Therefore, we expect that Swi...

The perception of speech sounds can be re-tuned through a mechanism of lexically driven perceptual learning after exposure to instances of atypical speech production. This study asked whether this re-tuning is sensitive to the position of the atypical sound within the word. We investigated perceptual learning using English voiced stop consonants, which are commonly devoiced in word-final positi...

An abstract of the thesis of Jennifer Weber for the Master of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences presented June 7, 2007. Title: Voice Onset Time (VOT) Of Voiced and Voiceless Initial Stops and Initial /s/+Stop Consonant Clusters in Monolingual English-speaking Adults and 4-

The absolute hegemony of international code of (academic) communication has resulted in the development and spread of the discoursal voice of the culture form which historical English has emerged, and, as a consequence, any violation from the generic conventions and thinking patterns born out of such a discourse has resulted in the deprivation of non-native thinkers form active participation in...

Production and perception of syllables in a second language (L2) that has relatively complex syllable structure, such as English, is expected to be difficult for native speakers of a language with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. A series of experiments investigated the perception, production, and learning of English syllables by native Japanese speakers. Results showed t...

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [character: see text] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[character: see text]k, [character: see text] t, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization an...

This study investigates whether perceptual learning (e.g. Norris, McQueen & Cutler 2003; Eisner & McQueen 2005; Kraljic & Samuel 2006, 2007; Kraljic, Samuel & Brennan 2008) has crosslinguistic effects in Hindi-English bilinguals. We hypothesized that perceptual learning in bilingual listeners generalizes across languages to similar phonemes in an untrained language. In particular, this study te...

Initiation and maintenance of vibrations of the vocal folds require suitable conditions of adduction, longitudinal tension, and transglottal airflow. Thus manipulation of adduction/abduction, stiffening/slackening, or degree of transglottal flow may, in principle, be used to determine the voicing status of a speech segment. This study explores the control of voicing and voicelessness in speech ...