Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infan...

When people learn foreign languages, they find it difficult to perceive speech sounds that are nonexistent in their native language, and extensive training is consequently necessary. Our previous studies have shown that by using neurofeedback based on the mismatch negativity event-related brain potential, participants could unconsciously achieve learning in the auditory discrimination of pure t...

The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, "warped" around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-native-sounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily m...

This paper describes a system for Chinese pronunciation and listening training on the Internet. The target Chinese stop consonants /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/ were chosen for this experiment. In the pronunciation component, a dynamic low-pass ltered power(DLP) was used as an acoustic feature to discriminate between aspirated sounds and unaspirated sounds. With the sounds uttered by Chinese native speake...

The mechanisms and functional anatomy underlying the early stages of speech perception are still not well understood. One way to investigate the cognitive and neural underpinnings of speech perception is by investigating patients with speech perception deficits but with preserved ability in other domains of language. One such case is reported here: patient NL shows highly impaired speech percep...

A possible side-effect of exposure to non-native sounds is a change in the way we perceive native sounds. Previous studies have demonstrated that native speakers’ speech production can change as a result of learning a new language, but little work has been carried out to measure the perceptual consequences of exposure. The current study examined how intensive exposure to Spanish intervocalic co...

Infants begin the acquisition of language-specific phoneme perception before their first birthday. In laboratory settings, infants are able to acquire categories on the basis of distributions of speech sounds. The speech sounds in infant-directed speech are distributed in such a way that computationally modeled distributional-learning mechanisms can acquire phoneme categories categories from th...

L-Systems have been extensively utilized in plant modeling and music rendering. However, the music generated was not very pleasant as the grammars used are very simple. This paper describes a hybrid method that generates more complex grammars for L-Systems in a visual language framework for music rendering so that the musical sounds generated can be improved and fine-tuned. The method which use...

In this article, we introduce recently released, publicly available resources, which allow users to watch videos of hidden articulators (e.g. the tongue) during the production of various types of sounds found in the world’s languages. The articulation videos on these resources are linked to a clickable International Phonetic Alphabet chart ([International Phonetic Association. 1999. Handbook of...

The vector-based spoken language recognition approach converts a spoken utterance into a high dimensional vector, also known as a bag-of-sounds vector, that consists of n-gram statistics of acoustic units. Dimensionality reduction would better prepare the bag-of-sounds vectors for classifier design. We propose projecting the bag-of-sounds vectors onto a low dimensional SVM output coding space, ...