The comprehension of fluent speech in one's native language requires that listeners integrate the detailed acoustic-phonetic information available in the sound signal with linguistic knowledge. This interplay is especially apparent in the phoneme restoration effect, a phenomenon in which a missing phoneme is "restored" via the influence of top-down information from the lexicon and through botto...

Kaytetye is an Australian language with a unique combination of phonemic pre-stopping in its nasals series, as well as non-contrastive pre-stopping in its lateral series. In this paper, we describe two phonetic correlates of pre-stopping in Kaytetye, segmental duration and extent of tongue movement. With nasals, pre-stopped segments are longer and have greater tongue movement than their plain c...

We test both bottom-up and top-down approaches in learning the phonemic status of the sounds of English and Japanese. We used large corpora of spontaneous speech to provide the learner with an input that models both the linguistic properties and statistical regularities of each language. We found both approaches to help discriminate between allophonic and phonemic contrasts with a high degree o...

We present a formalized rhyme function for machine approximation of human rhyme. Words are represented as sequences of phonemic features that facilitate the use of alignment mechanisms to compute different types of phonemic similarities between words. The rhyme function computes a weighted hierarchical combination of these similarities, with the weights determined using an evolutionary approach...

myths are reflective of human concerns and needs during ancient times. by reviewing them, it turns out that many human problems today, have a historical background. among the main themes of ancient mythologies, fertility and reproduction have various representations in ancient civilizations. the purpose of this paper was to review myths and common symbols of fertility and reproduction in ancien...