Whether music and language evolved independently of each other or whether both evolved from a common precursor remains a hotly debated topic. We here emphasize the role of vowels in the language-music relationship, arguing for a shared heritage of music and speech. Vowels play a decisive role in generating the sound or sonority of syllables, the main vehicles for transporting prosodic informati...

Consonants and vowels may play different roles during language processing, consonants being preferentially involved in lexical processing, and vowels tending to mark syntactic constituency through prosodic cues. In support of this view, artificial language learning studies have demonstrated that consonants (C) support statistical computations, while vowels (V) allow certain structural generaliz...

Abstract Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique early Islamic periods to disam-biguate vocalization of important texts, especially Bible. The earliest step this process was implementation ‘diacritic dot’ system, which used a single dot distinguish pairs homographs: ‘ab...

How does the brain extract invariant properties of variable-rate speech? A neural model, called PHONET, is developed to explain aspects of this process and, along the way, data about perceptual context effects. For example, in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, such as /ba/ and /wa/, an increase in the duration of the vowel can cause a switch in the percept of the preceding consonant from /w/ to /...

The high-frequency region of vowel signals (above the third formant or F3) has received little research attention. Recent evidence, however, has documented the perceptual utility of high-frequency information in the speech signal above the traditional frequency bandwidth known to contain important cues for speech and speaker recognition. The purpose of this study was to determine if high-pass f...

It has been argued that orthographic representations-the abstract mental representations of the spellings of words-include orthography-specific information regarding the consonant/vowel (CV) identity of the individual letters that make up a word's spelling. This hypothesis has been used to explain the finding that the substitution errors in the spelling of certain dysgraphic individuals exhibit...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Spanish children that are learning to read use the syllable unit in word reading. We used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommerges, Freavenfelder & Seguí, 1981). For Experiment I, we selected first grade readers at the end of the first year of reading instruction. In the Experiment II we selected second grade r...

Vowel devoicing is a phenomenon that is reported to occur in many languages such as Japanese, Parisian and Montreal French, Turkish and English. This paper investigates vowel devoicing in Korean. A devoiced vowel does not exhibit characteristic vocal tract resonances, and instead is realized as a long interval of aspiration or frication following consonant release, resulting in non-distinct seg...