English Listeners Use Suprasegmental Cues to Lexical Stress Early During Spoken-Word Recognition.

Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English.

Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g.

Discriminability and Perceptual Saliency of Temporal and Spectral Cues for Final Fricative Consonant Voicing in Simulated Cochlear-Implant and Bimodal Hearing.

Multiple redundant acoustic cues can contribute to the perception of a single phonemic contrast. This study investigated the effect of spectral degradation on the discriminability and perceptual saliency of acoustic cues for identification of word-final fricative voicing in "loss" versus "laws", and possible changes that occurred when low-frequency acoustic cues were restored. Three acoustic cues that contribute to the word-final /s/-/z/ contrast (first formant frequency [F1] offset, vowel-consonant duration ratio, and consonant voicing duration) were systematically varied in synthesized words.

Use what you can: storage, abstraction processes, and perceptual adjustments help listeners recognize reduced forms.

Three eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners recognized reduced Dutch words better after having heard the same reduced words, or different reduced words of the same reduction type and whether familiarization with one reduction type helps listeners to deal with another reduction type. In the exposure phase, a segmental reduction group was exposed to /b/-reductions (e.g.