Listening conditions affect bilinguals’ speech perception, but relatively little is known about the effect of the combination of several degrading listening conditions. We studied the combined effect of speech rate and background noise on bilinguals’ speech perception in their L1 and L2. Speech perception of twenty Israeli university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew as L2, ...

Previous research shows that pausing and disfluencies are common in non-native speech. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between fluency and pausing in Russian read-aloud speech of 12 Finnish university students and examine their fluency development during a 3.5-month study-period in Russia. To assess fluency, 30 Russian teachers rated the students’ speech samples (on a ...

Based on spontaneous speech data of the Tuu language Nǀuu, we used the cross-linguistically established domain-initial strengthening concept in order to examine, if and in which way clicks are subject to speech reduction (lenition) in relation to a reference sample of plosives. Results of combined acoustic and auditory analyses suggest that clicks can be reduced in a gradual fashion and show mo...

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Microresonator-based soliton generation promises chip-scale integration of optical frequency combs for applications spanning from time keeping to synthesis. Access the repetition rate is a prerequisite those applications. While miniaturized cavities harness Kerr nonlinearity and enable terahertz rates, such high rates are not amenable direct electronic detection. Here, we demonstrate hybrid ele...

Repetitions that are distributed (spaced) across time prompt enhancement of a memory-related event-related potential, compared to when repetitions are massed (contiguous). Here, we used fMRI to investigate neural enhancement and suppression effects during free viewing of natural scenes that were either novel or repeated four times with massed or distributed repetitions. Distributed repetition w...

Impairments in phonological processing have been associated with damage to the region of the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), but the extent to which this area supports phonological processing, independent of semantic processing, is less clear. We used repetition priming and neural repetition suppression during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in an auditory pseudoword...