Eight experiments tested the hypothesis that infants' word segmentation abilities are reducible to familiar sound-pattern parsing regardless of actual word boundaries. This hypothesis was disconfirmed in experiments using the headturn preference procedure: 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word (e.g., dice) from passages containing the corresponding phonemic p...

Psychophysical, clinical, and imaging evidence suggests that consonant and vowel sounds have distinct neural representations. This study tests the hypothesis that consonant and vowel sounds are represented on different timescales within the same population of neurons by comparing behavioral discrimination with neural discrimination based on activity recorded in rat inferior colliculus and prima...

Although studies of speech perception often focus on the interpretation of the acoustic speech waveform, in many situations the face of the talker can be seen by the listener and the perception of facial actions can greatly influence the interpretation of this signal. When the acoustic signal is unclear, observed facial actions can improve intelligibility [14]. On the other hand, even when the ...

Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant–vowel–consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gak/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly...

In this paper we pose the problem of approximating an arbitrary belief function (b.f.) with a consonant one, in a geometric framework in which belief functions are represented by the vectors of their basic probabilities, or “mass space”. Given such a vector ~ mb, the consonant b.f. which minimizes an appropriate distance function from ~ mb can be sought. We consider here the classical L1, L2 an...

Inari Saami, an endangered Finno-Ugric language of Northern Finland, is reported to have a three-way surface contrast in consonant length (short, halflong and long). We studied disyllabic words (C)V1CxV2(C) using data from 5 native speakers under two conditions, with short and long preceding vowel, V1, and found support for the claim that Inari Saami has a ternary contrast in consonant length. ...

Tahltan is an Athapaskan language with perhaps the world's only three-way consonant harmony system (dental, alveolar, and alveopalatal). Although most explanations have depended on feature analysis, Gafos [1] proposed that differences in tongue grooving could account for the pattern. Here, we use ultrasound to examine the initial plausibility of this argument by determining whether a language w...

Consonant-Vowel (CV) construction is the most frequent syllable in Bangla. The present study examine the acoustic properties of Bangla four labial stop consonants [p, ph, b and bh] in the initial position in a consonant-vowel context with seven following vowels /ɔ, a, e, æ, i, u, o/. Bangla is a type of language that uses aspiration as an addition feature to distinguish phoneme. Bangla labial s...

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency o...