Spanish (L2) speakers have difficulty in perceiving the French vowel height contrast /e/-/ /. L2 perception models attribute this perceptual difficulty to native (L1) phonology. For example, the Spanish /e/ vowel, which is perceptually similar to both French vowels, is assumed to influence their perception through an assimilation process. This pattern of assimilation depends upon the degree of ...

To probe how episodic and abstract processes contribute to flexible perception of phonetically variable speech, we evaluated Australian (Aus) listeners’ perception of Aus-accented vowels versus those of an unfamiliar accent: Newcastle UK (Ncl). Aus listeners first heard a round-robin story told by multiple talkers of Aus or Ncl, then categorized multi-talker tokens of 20 vowels in nonce words s...

We describe a sequential assimilation approach useful for assimilating tracer measurements into a threedimensional chemical transport model (CTM) of the stratosphere. The numerical code, developed largely according to Khattatov et al. (2000), uses parameterizations and simplifications allowing assimilation of sparse observations and the simultaneous evaluation of analysis errors, with reasonabl...

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their rela...

In this paper a LVCSR system with implementation of the Czech voice assimilation phenomenon is proposed. The recognition system uses lexical trees and a bigram language model. The first part of this article is focused on voice assimilation phenomenon description, triphone lexical tree construction, and voice assimilation impact on LVCSR system performance. The second part outlines lexical tree ...

Perceptual and Attentional Constraints on 1:1 Bimanual Coordination. (May 2010) Attila J. Kovacs, B.S., Transilvania University; M.Ed., Wayne State University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Charles H. Shea Two experiments were conducted in an attempt to further the understanding of how previously identified intrinsic constraints and perceptual factors interact in influencing the learning and ...

Variants of a lightness effect described by [Todorovic's, D. (1997). Lightness and junctions. Perception, 26, 379] were studied to quantify the failure of lightness constancy as a function of target luminance and target size. Todorovic's effect is similar to White's effect. Simultaneous lightness contrast appears to operate selectively between stimuli belonging to the same perceptual group, and...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Many studies have shown that experienced second language (L2) learners are more skilled than novice L2 learners at a variety of L2 tasks, including auditory discrimination between members of L2 phonological contrasts. In this paper we argued that while L2 experience is typically beneficial when comparing the effects of more versus less experience, it is not necessarily beneficia...

Data assimilation algorithms combine a numerical model with observations in a quantitative way. For an optimal combination either variational minimization algorithms or ensemble-based estimation methods are applied. The computations of a data assimilation application are usually far more costly than a pure model integration. To cope with the large computational costs, a good scalability of the ...