In this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a 慺ul...

UNLABELLED When learning a new language, we build brain networks to process and represent the acquired words and syntax and integrate these with existing language representations. It is an open question whether the same or different neural mechanisms are involved in learning and processing a novel language compared with the native language(s). Here we investigated the neural repetition effects ...

Repeated stimulus presentation leads to reductions in responses of cortical neurons, known as repetition suppression or stimulus-specific adaptation. Circuit-based models of repetition suppression provide a framework for investigating patterns of repetition effects that propagate through cortical hierarchies. To further develop such models it is critical to determine whether (and if so, when) r...

Neural measures of repetition can result in either repetition suppression or enhancement effects, with enhancement sometimes interpreted as indicating episodic retrieval, rather than stimulus habituation. Here, we manipulated whether repetitions were massed (consecutive) or distributed (intermixed) and measured event-related potentials and oscillatory activity, investigating the question of whe...

Repetition ability is a major criterion for classifying aphasic syndromes and its status is helpful in the determination of the involved neural structures. It is widely assumed that repetition deficits correlate with injury to the left perisylvian core including the arcuate fasciculus (AF). However, descriptions of normal repetition despite damage to the AF or impaired repetition without AF inv...

The ability to distinguish fluent from disfluent speech could play an important role in infants’ acquisition of their first language. Across two experiments using a Headturn Preference Procedure, we show that infants are able to distinguish fluent from disfluent speech based on its prosodic characteristics, and show a preference for listening to fluent English. In the first experiment, 22-month...