Robustness in Pre-Lexical Speech Perception

Lexical and Sublexical Units in Speech Perception

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word-segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clusterin...

On the robustness of Speech Perception

Speech perception is remarkably robust despite many potential communicative obstacles such as background noise and talker variation. One reason for this is that speech sounds are selected to be auditorily distinctive even under adverse listening conditions. For many years, my colleagues and I have been exploring a general account of the distinctiveness of vowels and consonants referred to as th...

Speech perception, well-formedness, and lexical frequency

Positional effects in the lexical retuning of speech perception.

Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Dutch listeners learn to interpret an ambiguous sound between /s/ and /f/ as /f/ if they hear it word-finally in Dutch words normally ending in /f/, but as /s/ if they hear it in normally /s/-final words. Here, we examined two positional effects in lexically guided retuning. In Experiment 1, ambiguous sounds du...

Speech perception and lexical effects in specific language impairment.

Using an identification task, we examined lexical effects on the perception of vowel duration as a cue to final consonant voicing in 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 age-matched (6;6-9;6) peers with typical language development (TLD). Naturally recorded CV/t/sets [word-word (WW), nonword-nonword (NN), word-nonword (WN) and nonword-word (NW)] were edited to create four ...