During the process of spoken word recognition, listeners must cope with a large amount of variation in the speech signal. Some of this variation is conditioned by context (e.g. allophonic variation) and thus, regular and predictable. Faced with this kind of variation, listeners must be able to map two or more acoustically distinct surface forms onto the same lexical representation. In this pape...

This paper presents an inventory and relative frequency estimation of glides on the 527,190 word-form Standard Slovenian lexicon. Detailed acoustic-phonetic measurements for the first four most frequent glides /ai/, /au/, /ou/, and /ei/ in stressed syllables are given. Inspection of their formant trajectory plots enabeled measurements of the first four formants in the onset and offset steady-st...

We explore general strategies for finite-state syllabification and describe a specific implementation of a wide-coverage syllabifier for English, as well as outline methods to implement differing ideas encountered in the phonological literature about the English syllable. The syllable is a central phonological unit to which many allophonic variations are sensitive. How a word is syllabified is ...

This paper examines exceptionality and variation phenomena in Modern Hebrew spirantization, and discusses their theoretical implications. In Modern Hebrew, spirantization affects /b/, /p/, and /k/. These stops alternate with their fricative counterparts [v], [f], and [X], respectively, in allophonic distribution, with the fricatives occurring postvocalically and the stops occurring elsewhere (A...

To attain native-like competence, second language (L2) learners must establish mappings between familiar speech sounds and new phoneme categories. For example, Spanish learners of English must learn that [d] and [ð], which are allophones of the same phoneme in Spanish, can distinguish meaning in English (i.e., /deɪ/ "day" and /ðeɪ/ "they"). Because adult listeners are less sensitive to allophon...

This paper reports data from a pilot project that is part of an ongoing study investigating the second-language (L2) acquisition of phonemic contrasts. Our focus will be on the acquisition of the English /s/ /š/ contrast by native speakers of Japanese and Korean. These native language backgrounds were chosen because Japanese and Korean employ the sounds in question as allophones of the same pho...

We tested the hypothesis that rapid shadowers imitate the articulatory gestures that structure acoustic speech signals-not just acoustic patterns in the signals themselves-overcoming highly practiced motor routines and phonological conditioning in the process. In a first experiment, acoustic evidence indicated that participants reproduced allophonic differences between American English /l/ type...