the distribution of the allophones of /?/in certain contexts involves free variation and gradient preferences. an organized survey was conducted to elicit the judgments of 37 native persian speakers concerning the well-formedness of /?/allophonic behavior in five different phonological positions. the results showed that the differences in judgment between the various categories are not just t...

The study evaluated whether durational and allophonic cues to word boundaries are intrinsic to syllable production, and so acquired with syllable structure, or whether they are suprasyllabic, and so acquired in phrasal contexts. Twenty preschool children (aged 3;6 and 4;6) produced: (1) single words with simple and complex onsets (e.g. nail vs. snail); and (2) two-word phrases with intervocalic...

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of chronological age and reading level controls. Children...

This study investigates the non-native production of rhotics by Mandarin speakers learning Persian as L3 and it compares the results with that of native speakers. In the light of the findings, one of the predictions made by the Speech Learning Model was tested. According to this model, speech acquisition happens at a position-sensitive allophonic level. A series of informal /casual interviews w...

We present a computational evaluation of a hypothesis according to which distributional information is su cient to acquire allophonic rules (and hence phonemes) in a bottom-up fashion. The hypothesis was tested using a measure based on information theory that compares distributions. The test was conducted on several arti cial language corpora and on two natural corpora containing transcriptions...

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of potential breathy-to-creaky phonation contours from a production study of native speakers of English, White Hmong, and Korean. These languages differ in the nature of the ...

Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English (JE) to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners are sensitive to such allophonic variations when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic English words containing word-medial /t/, hal...

This paper investigates the phonetics and phonology of stop consonant allophony in the Mayan language Tz’utujil (Guatemala; ∼ 70,000 speakers). Tz’utujil, like Mayan languages more generally, contrasts plain voiceless stops with a glottalized stop series. The allophonic realization of this laryngeal state contrast varies dramatically by context, with prevocalic stops showing starkly different p...