This study investigates the effects of context on recognizing reduced word forms in spontaneous speech. Sixteen high-frequency disyllabic targets, eight disyllabic and eight combinations of monosyllabic words are presented to 48 subjects in a spoken word recognition experiment in three conditions: in their original context, in isolation, and embedded in a carrier sentence. Results show that con...

The study focused on phonetic imitation in the speech of Polish learners of English, who were exposed to two pronunciation varieties: Polishaccented English and native English. The phonetic variables under investigation were voicing lag values in word-initial /p k/ and voicing lead values in word-initial /b g/. The stimuli were monosyllabic English words provided by two model talkers: a native ...

This PhD thesis examines a phenomenon known as Monosyllabic Circumflexion (MC, hereafter) from a historical linguistics / phonological point of view. MC denotes a Lithuanian or Balto-Slavic phenomenon according to which long vowels and diphthongs in monosyllabic words exhibit a circumflex tone instead of the expected acute tone. It is observed in the following four categories: I. 3rd person fut...

Abstract. Inspired by recent findings on the similarities between the primary auditory and visual cortex we propose a neural network for speech recognition based on a hierarchical feedforward architecture for visual object recognition. When using a Gammatone filterbank for the spectral analysis the resulting spectrograms of syllables can be interpreted as images. After a preprocessing enhancing...

A stretch of speech is often consistent with multiple words, e.g., the sequence /hæm/ is consistent with ‘ham’ but also with the first syllable of ‘hamster’, resulting in temporary ambiguity. However, to what degree does this lexical embedding occur? Analyses on two corpora of spoken Dutch showed that 11.9%-19.5% of polysyllabic word tokens have word-initial embedding, while 4.1%-7.5% of monosy...

How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) existing words [see text], (b) wellformed novel wor...

Noun class information is a crucial component of the interface between the lexicon and the grammar. In order to explain linguistic productivity it is necessary to assume that linguistic rules are defined not over specific words, but classes of word. This is not only true given the classical distinction between lexicon and grammar, but also in 'emergentist' views which see no clear separation be...

Two experiments were conducted, using Moroccan Arabic data, to evaluate conflicting predictions of autonomous and interactive models of spoken word recognition. In Experiment 1, lexical decision response times indicated the presence of strong lexical effects both with monosyllabic and bisyllabic words. In experiment 2, a General Phoneme Monitoring task was used in which subjects were asked to m...

The SWITCHBOARD (SWB) corpus is one of the most important benchmarks for recognition tasks involving large vocabulary conversational speech (LVCSR). The high error rates on SWB are largely attributable to an acoustic model mismatch, the high frequency of poorly articulated monosyllabic words, and large variations in pronunciations. It is imperative to improve the quality of segmentations and tr...

Two experiments were conducted, using Moroccan Arabic data, to evaluate conflicting predictions of autonomous and interactive models of spoken word recognition. In Experiment 1, lexical decision response times indicated the presence of strong lexical effects both with monosyllabic and bisyllabic words. In experiment 2, a General Phoneme Monitoring task was used in which subjects were asked to m...