Auditory Processing of Intonational Rises and Falls in German: Rises Are Special in Attention Orienting.

This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of an MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours.

Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English.

This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations.