1 Introduction The phonetic or articulatory difference impedes the perception of certain English sounds produced by native Japanese speakers; English voiceless stops fall under this category of sounds. English voiceless stops are characterized by aspiration in articulation, whereas their Japanese counterparts are known to be unaspirated. As Cruttenden (2001) and Jenkins (2000) point out to lear...

Speech-in-speech perception can be challenging because the processing of competing acoustic and linguistic information leads to informational masking. Here, a method is proposed to isolate the linguistic component of informational masking while keeping the distractor's acoustic information unchanged. Participants performed a dichotic listening cocktail-party task before and after training on 4-...

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel ...

In this MA-project a Dutch TTS system based on Festival, NeXTeNS, has been changed step by step into a Frisian system. As for many minority languages, Frisian too has very few digital resources. So, the challenge of this project is to make the system as intelligible as possible with minimal resources. The resulting TTS system is called FRYSS. At the end of the thesis period an evaluation was ca...

Many philosophers of science believe that empirical psychology can contribute little to the philosophical investigation of explanations. They take this to be shown by the fact that certain explanations fail to elicit any relevant psychological events (e.g., familiarity, insight, intelligibility, etc.). We report results from a study suggesting that, at least among those with extensive science t...