Environmental sounds are very helpful in understanding environmental situations and in telling the approach of danger, and sound-imitation words (sound-related onomatopoeia) are important expressions to inform such sounds in human communication, especially in Japanese language. In this paper, we design a method to recognize sound-imitation words (SIWs) for environmental sounds. Critical issues ...

We present a computational model that learns a coupling between motor parameters and their sensory consequences in vocal production during a babbling phase. Based on the coupling, preferred motor parameters and prototypically perceived sounds develop concurrently. Exposure to an ambient language modifies perception to coincide with the sounds from the language. The model develops motor mirror n...

AbstractPresenting the joint historical and methodological framework of theme issue “Sounds Language—Languages Sound,” this introduction situates individual contributions within a bro...

It is well known that multilingual speakers' nonnative productions are accented. Do these deviations from monolingual productions simply reflect the mislearning of nonnative sound categories, or can difficulties in processing speech sounds also contribute to a speaker's accent? Such difficulties are predicted by interactive theories of production, which propose that nontarget representations, p...

The fundamental frequency of a complex sound modulates the perceived duration of a sound. Higher pitch sounds are perceived longer compared to lower pitch sounds as shown by several independent studies since 1973. In this paper, the effect of language background is studied: native speakers of Finnish and German participated in a two alternative forced choice duration discrimination experiment w...

For nearly two decades it has been known that infants’ perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phoneti...

This report. contains fourteen papers on a wide range of current.topics and experiments in,speech research, ranging from the relationshipbetween-speecb:and reading to questions of memory and perception of speech sounds.,The following papers are included: "How Is Language Conveyed by Speech?;" "Reading, the Linguistic Process, and Linquistic_Awareness;" "Misreading:.A. Search for Causes;" "Langu...

Understanding foreign speech is difficult, in part because of unusual mappings between sounds and words. It is known that listeners in their native language can use lexical knowledge (about how words ought to sound) to learn how to interpret unusual speech-sounds. We therefore investigated whether subtitles, which provide lexical information, support perceptual learning about foreign speech. Du...

This article presents the results of a perception study of foreign phonemes, in particular, Polish phonemes categorized by Croatian native listeners. Our experiment shows that listeners can identify phonemes of an unknown/new language (L2) without having had prior training in this new language if the phonemes utilize the same phonological distinctive features as employed in the native language ...