The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support...

This article reports on a perception study that was carried out with Zulu-English bilinguals in order to investigate how suprasegmental aspects differ in Black South African English compared to White English-speaking South African English. Two prosodic phenomena were investigated: prosodic focus marking on noun phrases (NPs) and prosodic boundary marking. The results support existing claims in ...

The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...

In this paper, we propose a method for generating a pronunciation dictionary—extracting typical pronunciations for each word from speech data uttered by Japanese speakers—as one approach to speech recognition targeting English speech uttered by Japanese speakers whose mother tongue is not English. This method includes three processes: a process in which English phoneme HMMs (Hidden Markov Model...

Little is known about how listeners judge phonemic versus allophonic (or freely varying) versus post-lexical variations in voice quality, or about which acoustic attributes serve as perceptual cues in specific contexts. To address this issue, native speakers of Gujarati, Thai, and English discriminated among pairs of voices that differed only in the relative amplitudes of the first versus secon...

OBJECTIVE To describe a 10-year proof-of-concept smoking cessation research program evaluating the reach of online health interventions throughout the Americas. METHODS Recruitment occurred from 2002 - 2011, primarily using Google.com AdWords. Over 6 million smokers from the Americas entered keywords related to smoking cessation; 57 882 smokers (15 912 English speakers and 41 970 Spanish spea...

This study investigates how similarly present and absent English phonemes behind noise are perceived by native and non-native speakers. Participants were English native speakers and Japanese native speakers who spoke English as a second language. They listened to English words and non-words in which a phoneme was covered by noise (added; phoneme + noise) or replaced by noise (replaced; noise on...

How does interaction affect categorization, and how might this vary between native and non-native speakers? When people use shared labels to categorize objects, they categorize more similarly to each other. We investigated whether interaction leads non-native speakers to categorize in the same way as native speakers. In six rounds, L1-English and L2-English/L1Mandarin speakers individually cate...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if adults whose native language permits neither voiced nor voiceless stops to occur in word-final position can master the English word-final /t/-/d/ contrast. Native English-speaking listeners identified the voicing feature in word-final stops produced by talkers in five groups: native speakers of English, experienced and inexperienced native Spani...