The contrastive/noncontrastive model developed by Seymour and Seymour (1977) can be applied to the development of a dialect-sensitive phonological assessment that uses a single scoring and test format, regardless of a child's dialect. Through extensive field research, stimulus items were found that respect the phonotactics of African American English (AAE) (i.e., no targets are final consonants...

This study investigates whether the earliest words children choose to say are mainly words containing sounds they can produce (cf. 'phonological dominance' hypotheses), or whether children choose words without regard to their phonological characteristics (cf. 'lexical dominance' hypotheses). Phonological properties of words in spontaneous speech from six children age 0;8 to 2;11 were analyzed b...

In three experiments, we examined how readers learn and generalize new pronunciations for vowel graphemes. Children ages 6 1/2 to 9 (n = 97) and college students (n = 21) were taught a nonword that included a novel vowel pronunciation in the middle position (e.g., zuop is pronounced /zup/). They were then asked to pronounce other nonwords that contained the same vowel grapheme. Participants wer...

This paper investigates the prosodic conditioning of the segment production and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in the Standard Chinese through electropalatographic and acoustic analysis. The articulatory and acoustic measures were obtained for un-aspirated alveolar consonant /t/ and vowels /i/ and /a/. Results show that the domain-initial consonant is strengthened in a hierarchical manner in hig...

This preliminary study addresses two complementary questions about the production of sandhi phenomena in French. First, we investigated whether the encoding of enchaînement and liaison enchaînée involves a processing cost compared to non-resyllabified sequences. This question was analyzed with a psycholinguistic production time paradigm. The elicited sequences were then used to address our seco...

Natural, spontaneous speech (and even quite careful speech) often shows extreme reduction in many speech segments, even resulting in apparent deletion of consonants. Where the flap ([inverted J]) allophone of /t/ and /d/ is expected in American English, one frequently sees an approximant-like or even vocalic pattern, rather than a clear flap. Still, the /t/ or /d/ is usually perceived, suggesti...

Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-old infants from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position (e.g. /baep/ not /paeb/). In a later head-turn preference test, infants lis...

In the first phase of this paper, we describe the construction of a Bangla speech synthesizer. In the second phase, we discuss our work on Bangla nasal vowel. Nasality is one of the distinctive characteristic of Bangla phonemes. We discuss methods employed for transforming Bangla oral vowel to the corresponding nasal vowel counterpart and its application to our speech synthesizer. The perceptua...