This paper presents the design methodology for the bilingual pronunciation dictionary of sound reference usage, which reflects the cross-linguistic, dialectal, first language (L1) interfered, biological and allophonic variations. The design methodology features 1) the comprehensive coverage of allophonic variation, 2) concise data entry composed of a balanced distribution of dialects, genders, ...

Phonemic analysis, the process of identifying the contrastive sounds in a language, involves finding allophones; phonetic variants of those contrastive sounds. An algorithm for finding allophones (developed by Peperkamp et al.) is evaluated on consonants in the TIMIT acoustic phonetic transcripts. A novel phonetic filter based on the active articulator is introduced and has a higher recall than...

The phonotactics of a language describes the ways in which the sounds of the language combine to form possible morphemes and words. Humans can learn phonotactic patterns at the level of abstract classes, generalizing across sounds (e.g., “words can end in a voiced stop”). Moreover, they rapidly acquire these generalizations, even before they acquire soundspecific patterns. We present a probabil...

Language impairment is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The origin of the deficit is poorly understood although deficiencies in auditory processing have been detected in both perception and cortical encoding of speech sounds. Little is known about the processing and transcription of speech sounds at earlier (brainstem) levels or about how background noise may impact this transcrip...

The present study examines transfer errors at the levels of phonetics and syntax in the interlanguage of 10 fourteen-year-old Basque/Spanish bilinguals who have been learning English for 7 years in a formal school context in the Basque Country. Analyses showed that learners display L1 effects in the acquisition of both English phonetics and syntax, even though phonetic transfer errors (replacem...

Psycholinguistic repercussions of early experience in informal translation (language brokering) were examined in two tasks administered to proficient Spanish-English bilingual adults who had extensive brokering experience during childhood and proficient bilinguals without prior brokering experience. It was hypothesized that experience in language brokering leads to a greater sensitivity to non-...

It has been found that auditory-visual integration in the McGurk effect is affected by the relationship between the language of the speaker and that of the perceiver: for a foreign speaker, perceivers tend to incorporate visual information to a greater extent. We investigated whether this is due to the perceivers’ detection of the speech sounds as foreign or to an expectancy based upon the appe...

There is great variation in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted or retained. Importantly, the retention of foreign sounds can lead to a sound change in the language. We propose that social factors influence the likelihood of loanword sound adaptation, and use this case to introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying language change that captures the role of social factors. S...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced iranian esl learners. a total of 36 adult iranian esl learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at memorial university (mun) were recruited for the study. advanced participants had the experience of living in canada for at least three years while beginners...