Abstract Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds’ probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing boundaries (Spanish /e/–/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we assessed listener's neural discrimination across th...

One of the first steps infants take in learning their native language is to discover its set of speech-sound categories. This early development is shown when infants begin to lose the ability to differentiate some of the speech sounds their language does not use, while retaining or improving discrimination of language-relevant sounds. However, this aspect of early phonological tuning is not suf...

Pronunciation of English language is a very important sub-skill of speaking module in second language learning process. However, it is ignored, neglected, and even never gotten least attention by the teachers, administrators, and stakeholders especially in Pakistan. Grammar, vocabulary, and the other linguistic skills such as reading and writing are emphasized whereas pronunciation has never be...

In language learning, mastering all four skills is considered ideal. Some say speaking comes naturally, even in the learning of a foreign language. Listening sis also skill many link with speaking. One needs to listen how sounds be able imitate sounds. Writing ,although has been seen as difficult by many, are that people need -be it formally or informally. Finally, reading skills. There extensi...

There scientific and therapeutic advances in perinatology neonatology have improved the survival prospects of preterm extremely low birth weight infants. Infants' cries are a valuable noninvasive tool for monitoring their neurologic health, especially if they premature. An automatic acoustic analysis data mining employed this study to determine discriminative features full-term infant cries. Th...

Human spontaneous face-to-face conversations are characterized by phenomena such as turn-taking, feedback, sounds of hesitation and repairs. A simple and highly modular streambased approach to natural language processing is proposed that attempts to deal with such things. A basic version of the model has been implemented in the Oz programming language.

One approach to the transcription of written text into sounds (phonetization) is to use a set of welldefined language-dependent rules, which are in most situations augmented by a dictionary of exceptional words that constitute their on rules. The process of transcribing into sounds starts by pre-processing the text into lexical items to which the rules are applicable. The rules can be segregate...