Phonetic complexity affects children's Mandarin tone production accuracy in disyllabic words: A perceptual study.

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children's lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin-speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli.

Acoustical analysis of Canadian French word-final vowels in varying phonetic contexts.

This study analyzed Canadian French (CF) vowels /i y ø e ɛ o u a/ in word-final position. Of particular interest was the stability of /e-ɛ/; although some dialects of French have merged /e-ɛ/ to /e/ in word-final context, this contrast is maintained in CF. The present study investigated the stability of this contrast in various preceding phonetic contexts and in lexical vs morphological contrasts.

Neural measures of a Japanese consonant length discrimination by Japanese and American English listeners: Effects of attention.

This study examined automaticity of discrimination of a Japanese length contrast for consonants (miʃi vs. miʃʃi) in native (Japanese) and non-native (American-English) listeners using behavioral measures and the event-related potential (ERP) mismatch negativity (MMN). Attention to the auditory input was manipulated either away from the auditory input via a visual oddball task (Visual Attend), or to the input by asking the listeners to count auditory deviants (Auditory Attend).

Cross-language perceptual similarity predicts categorial discrimination of American vowels by naïve Japanese listeners.

Current speech perception models propose that relative perceptual difficulties with non-native segmental contrasts can be predicted from cross-language phonetic similarities. Japanese (J) listeners performed a categorical discrimination task in which nine contrasts (six adjacent height pairs, three front/back pairs) involving eight American (AE) vowels [iː, ɪ, ε, æː, ɑː, ʌ, ʊ, uː] in /hVbə/ disyllables were tested. The listeners also completed a perceptual assimilation task (categorization as J vowels with category goodness ratings).

Perception of Japanese temporally-cued contrasts by American English listeners.

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs.

Perception of a Japanese vowel length contrast by Japanese and American English listeners: behavioral and electrophysiological measures.

This study examined the role of automatic selective perceptual processes in native and non-native listeners' perception of a Japanese vowel length contrast (tado vs. taado), using multiple, natural-speech tokens of each category as stimuli in a "categorial oddball" design. Mismatch negativity (MMN) was used to index discrimination of the temporally-cued vowel contrast by naïve adult American listeners and by a native Japanese-speaking control group in two experiments in which attention to the auditory input was manipulated: in Exp 1 (Visual-Attend), listeners silently counted deviants in a simultaneously-presented visual categorial oddball shape discrimination task; in Exp 2 (Auditory-Attend), listeners attended to the auditory input and implicitly counted target deviants.

Perceptual assimilation of American English vowels by inexperienced Russian listeners.

In a perceptual assimilation task, 16 Russian speakers categorized American English (AE) vowels [i[see text], I, epsilon, ae[see tedxt], a[see text], u[see text]] in /Vp/ disyllables into Russian (RU) response categories and rated their perceived goodness on a 9-point Likert scale. Cross-language discriminant analysis established acoustic similarities to Russian vowels. For all but AE [epsilon], acoustic similarity predicted modal assimilation responses.

Cross-language categorization of French and German vowels by naive American listeners.

American English (AE) speakers' perceptual assimilation of 14 North German (NG) and 9 Parisian French (PF) vowels was examined in two studies using citation-form disyllables (study 1) and sentences with vowels surrounded by labial and alveolar consonants in multisyllabic nonsense words (study 2). Listeners categorized multiple tokens of each NG and PF vowel as most similar to selected AE vowels and rated their category "goodness" on a nine-point Likert scale. Front, rounded vowels were assimilated primarily to back AE vowels, despite their acoustic similarity to front AE vowels.

Perception of allophonic cues to English word boundaries by Japanese second language learners of English.

Perception of stop aspiration and glottal stop allophonic cues for word juncture in English by Japanese second language (L2) learners of English was examined, extending a study of Spanish L2 learners [Altenberg, E. P. (2005).

Acoustic and perceptual similarity of Japanese and American English vowels.

Acoustic and perceptual similarities between Japanese and American English (AE) vowels were investigated in two studies. In study 1, a series of discriminant analyses were performed to determine acoustic similarities between Japanese and AE vowels, each spoken by four native male speakers using F1, F2, and vocalic duration as input parameters. In study 2, the Japanese vowels were presented to native AE listeners in a perceptual assimilation task, in which the listeners categorized each Japanese vowel token as most similar to an AE category and rated its goodness as an exemplar of the chosen AE category.

Acoustic variability within and across German, French, and American English vowels: phonetic context effects.

Cross-language perception studies report influences of speech style and consonantal context on perceived similarity and discrimination of non-native vowels by inexperienced and experienced listeners. Detailed acoustic comparisons of distributions of vowels produced by native speakers of North German (NG), Parisian French (PF) and New York English (AE) in citation (di)syllables and in sentences (surrounded by labial and alveolar stops) are reported here. Results of within- and cross-language discriminant analyses reveal striking dissimilarities across languages in the spectral/temporal variation of coarticulated vowels.

Perceptual invariance of coarticulated vowels over variations in speaking rate.

This study examined the perception and acoustics of a large corpus of vowels spoken in consonant-vowel-consonant syllables produced in citation-form (lists) and spoken in sentences at normal and rapid rates by a female adult. Listeners correctly categorized the speaking rate of sentence materials as normal or rapid (2% errors) but did not accurately classify the speaking rate of the syllables when they were excised from the sentences (25% errors). In contrast, listeners accurately identified the vowels produced in sentences spoken at both rates when presented the sentences and when presented the excised syllables blocked by speaking rate or randomized.

Training the perception of Hindi dental and retroflex stops by native speakers of American English and Japanese.

Perception of second language speech sounds is influenced by one's first language. For example, speakers of American English have difficulty perceiving dental versus retroflex stop consonants in Hindi although English has both dental and retroflex allophones of alveolar stops. Japanese, unlike English, has a contrast similar to Hindi, specifically, the Japanese /d/ versus the flapped /r/ which is sometimes produced as a retroflex.

Perception and production of English vowels by Mandarin speakers: age-related differences vary with amount of L2 exposure.

In this study we assessed age-related differences in the perception and production of American English (AE) vowels by native Mandarin speakers as a function of the amount of exposure to the target language. Participants included three groups of native Mandarin speakers: 87 children, adolescents and young adults living in China, 77 recent arrivals who had lived in the U.S.

Contextual variation in the acoustic and perceptual similarity of North German and American English vowels.

Strange et al. [J. Acoust.

Acoustic and perceptual similarity of North German and American English vowels.

Current theories of cross-language speech perception claim that patterns of perceptual assimilation of non-native segments to native categories predict relative difficulties in learning to perceive (and produce) non-native phones. Cross-language spectral similarity of North German (NG) and American English (AE) vowels produced in isolated hVC(a) (di)syllables (study 1) and in hVC syllables embedded in a short sentence (study 2) was determined by discriminant analyses, to examine the extent to which acoustic similarity was predictive of perceptual similarity patterns. The perceptual assimilation of NG vowels to native AE vowel categories by AE listeners with no German language experience was then assessed directly.