Language and Speech articles from December 2008

Language and Speech archives from December 2008

L1-Spanish speakers' acquisition of the English /i/-/I/ contrast: duration-based perception is not the initial developmental stage.
December 1, 2008... Abstract L1-Spanish L2-English listeners' perception of a Canadian-English /bIt/-/bId/-/bit/-/bid/ continuum was investigated. Results were largely consistent with the developmental stages for L1-Spanish listeners' acquisition of English...

Child-adult differences in second-language phonological learning: the role of cross-language similarity.
December 1, 2008... Abstract This study evaluated whether age effects on second language (L2) speech learning derive from changes in how the native language (L1) and L2 sound systems interact. According to the "interaction hypothesis" (IH), the older the L2...

Perceptual tests of rhythmic similarity: II. Syllable rhythm.
December 1, 2008... Abstract To segment continuous speech into its component words, listeners make use of language rhythm; because rhythm differs across languages, so do the segmentation procedures which listeners use. For each of stress-, syllable- and...

Word length and lexical competition: longer is the same as shorter.
December 1, 2008... Abstract Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has...

Compensatory vowel lengthening for omitted coda consonants: a phonetic investigation of children's early representations of prosodic words.
December 1, 2008... Abstract Children's early word productions often differ from the target form, sometimes exhibiting vowel lengthening when word-final coda consonants are omitted (e.g., dog/dcg/[right arrow] [dc:]). It has typically been assumed that such...