Perceptually Easy Second-Language Phones Are Not Always Easy: The Role of Orthography and Phonology in Schwa Realization in Second-Language French.

Encoding and establishing a new second-language (L2) phonological category is notoriously difficult. This is particularly true for phonological contrasts that do not exist in the learners' native language (L1). Phonological categories that also exist in the L1 do not seem to pose any problems.

Intact Utilization of Contextual Information in Speech Categorization in Autism.

Current theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suggest atypical use of context in ASD, but little is known about how these atypicalities influence speech perception. We examined the influence of contextual information (lexical, spectral, and temporal) on phoneme categorization of people with ASD and in typically developed (TD) people. Across three experiments, we found that people with ASD used all types of contextual information for disambiguating speech sounds to the same extent as TD; yet they exhibited a shallower identification curve when phoneme categorization required temporal processing.

Internal Cognitive Load Differentially Influences Acoustic and Lexical Context Effects in Speech Perception: Evidence From a Population With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Background: To overcome variability in spoken language, listeners utilize various types of context information for disambiguating speech sounds. Context effects have been shown to be affected by cognitive load. However, previous results are mixed regarding the influence of cognitive load on the use of context information in speech perception.

Assessment of first language adds important information to the diagnosis of language disorders in multilingual children.

Objective: 59% of Viennese day care children have a first language other than German. Lower proficiency in the second language German might be typical in multilingual settings, but might also be due to language disorder (ICD-10:F80 or comorbid). Diagnostic practise in Austria focuses on second language evaluation.

Selective adaptation of German /r/: A role for perceptual saliency.

In three experiments, we examined selective adaptation of German /r/ depending on the positional and allophonic overlap between adaptors and targets. A previous study had shown that selective adaptation effects with /r/ in Dutch require allophonic overlap between adaptor and target. We aimed at replicating this finding in German, which also has many allophones of /r/.

Cognitive load does not increase reliance on speaker information in phonetic categorization.

Past research on speech perception has shown that speaker information, such as gender, affects phoneme categorization. Additionally, studies on listening under divided attention have argued that cognitive load decreases attention to phonetic detail and increases reliance on higher-level cues such as lexical information. This study examines the processing of speaker information under divided attention.

Encoding speech rate in challenging listening conditions: White noise and reverberation.

Temporal contrasts in speech are perceived relative to the speech rate of the surrounding context. That is, following a fast context sentence, listeners interpret a given target sound as longer than following a slow context, and vice versa. This rate effect, often referred to as "rate-dependent speech perception," has been suggested to be the result of a robust, low-level perceptual process, typically examined in quiet laboratory settings.

Free Allophonic Variation in Native and Second Language Spoken Word Recognition: The Case of the German Rhotic.

The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German).

Increased reliance on top-down information to compensate for reduced bottom-up use of acoustic cues in dyslexia.

Speech recognition is a complex human behavior in the course of which listeners must integrate the detailed phonetic information present in the acoustic signal with their general linguistic knowledge. It is commonly assumed that this process occurs effortlessly for most people, but it is still unclear whether this also holds true in the case of developmental dyslexia (DD), a condition characterized by perceptual deficits. In the present study, we used a dual-task setting to test the assumption that speech recognition is effortful for people with DD.

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention.

Two fundamental properties of perception are selective attention and perceptual contrast, but how these two processes interact remains unknown. Does an attended stimulus history exert a larger contrastive influence on the perception of a following target than unattended stimuli? Dutch listeners categorized target sounds with a reduced prefix "ge-" marking tense (e.g.

The phonological form of lexical items modulates the encoding of challenging second-language sound contrasts.

The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-language (L2) contrasts into novel nonnative lexical representations is modulated by the phonological form of the words to be learned. In 3 experiments, German learners of English were trained on word-picture associations with either novel minimal pairs only differing in the difficult /ε/-/æ/ contrast (Experiments 1 and 2; e.g.

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers.

Second language (L2) learners are often aware of the typical pronunciation errors that speakers of their native language make, yet often persist in making these errors themselves. We hypothesised that L2 learners may perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions. This was tested by recording 24 female native speakers of German producing 60 sentences.

Spectral contrast effects are modulated by selective attention in "cocktail party" settings.

Speech sounds are perceived relative to spectral properties of surrounding speech. For instance, target words that are ambiguous between /bɪt/ (with low F1) and /bɛt/ (with high F1) are more likely to be perceived as "bet" after a "low F1" sentence, but as "bit" after a "high F1" sentence. However, it is unclear how these spectral contrast effects (SCEs) operate in multi-talker listening conditions.

Another Temporal Processing Deficit in Individuals With Developmental Dyslexia: The Case of Normalization for Speaking Rate.

Purpose Developmental dyslexia (DD) has mostly been attributed to arise from phonological impairments; however, several theories indicate a temporal processing deficit as the underlying cause of DD. So far, research examined the influence of temporal cues on concurrent speech sound categorization in DD, but effects of temporal information from a context (e.g.

Imitation in a Second Language Relies on Phonological Categories but Does Not Reflect the Productive Usage of Difficult Sound Contrasts.

This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners' phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/.

The impact of one's own voice and production skills on word recognition in a second language.

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented productions, presumably because of adaptation.

Foreign Languages Sound Fast: Evidence from Implicit Rate Normalization.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that unfamiliar languages sound faster than one's native language. Empirical evidence for this impression has, so far, come from rate judgments. The aim of the present study was to test whether such perceived rate differences between native and foreign languages (FLs) have effects on speech processing.

Articulatory information helps encode lexical contrasts in a second language.

The present study examined whether obtaining additional articulatory information about the sounds of a difficult second-language contrast (English /ε/-/æ/ for German speakers) could help nonnative listeners to encode a lexical distinction between novel words containing these two categories. Novel words (e.g.

Visual speech influences speech perception immediately but not automatically.

Two experiments examined the time course of the use of auditory and visual speech cues to spoken word recognition using an eye-tracking paradigm. Results of the first experiment showed that the use of visual speech cues from lipreading is reduced if concurrently presented pictures require a division of attentional resources. This reduction was evident even when listeners' eye gaze was on the speaker rather than the (static) pictures.

Natural fast speech is perceived as faster than linearly time-compressed speech.

Listeners compensate for variation in speaking rate: In a fast context, a given sound is interpreted as longer than in a slow context. Experimental rate manipulations have been achieved either through linear compression or by using natural fast speech. However, in natural fast speech, segments are subject to processes such as reduction or deletion.

Orbital tomography: Molecular band maps, momentum maps and the imaging of real space orbitals of adsorbed molecules.

The frontier orbitals of molecules are the prime determinants of their chemical, optical and electronic properties. Arguably, the most direct method of addressing the (filled) frontier orbitals is ultra-violet photoemission spectroscopy (UPS). Although UPS is a mature technique from the early 1970s on, the angular distribution of the photoemitted electrons was thought to be too complex to be analysed .

Divide and conquer: How perceptual contrast sensitivity and perceptual learning cooperate in reducing input variation in speech perception.

Listeners have to overcome variability of the speech signal that can arise, for example, because of differences in room acoustics, differences in speakers' vocal tract properties, or idiosyncrasies in pronunciation. Two mechanisms that are involved in resolving such variation are perceptually contrastive effects that arise from surrounding acoustic context and lexically guided perceptual learning. Although both processes have been studied in great detail, little attention has been paid to how they operate relative to each other in speech perception.

Phonetic category recalibration: What are the categories?

Listeners use lexical or visual context information to recalibrate auditory speech perception. After hearing an ambiguous auditory stimulus between /aba/ and /ada/ coupled with a clear visual stimulus (e.g.

Unexpected interplay of bonding height and energy level alignment at heteromolecular hybrid interfaces.

Although geometric and electronic properties of any physical or chemical system are always mutually coupled by the rules of quantum mechanics, counterintuitive coincidences between the two are sometimes observed. The coadsorption of the organic molecules 3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylic dianhydride and copper-II-phthalocyanine on Ag(111) represents such a case, since geometric and electronic structures appear to be decoupled: one molecule moves away from the substrate while its electronic structure indicates a stronger chemical interaction, and vice versa for the other. Our comprehensive experimental and ab-initio theoretical study reveals that, mediated by the metal surface, both species mutually amplify their charge-donating and -accepting characters, respectively.

Imaging the wave functions of adsorbed molecules.

The basis for a quantum-mechanical description of matter is electron wave functions. For atoms and molecules, their spatial distributions and phases are known as orbitals. Although orbitals are very powerful concepts, experimentally only the electron densities and -energy levels are directly observable.