Second language learners often experience difficulties discriminating L2 contrasts absent in their L1. Theoretical frameworks, (e.g., SLM, PAM, L2LP), make predictions about the acquisition of phonemes based on existence equivalent or similar L1 phonemes, but do not explicitly consider extent allophonic variability as a contributing factor. The present study compared perceptual discrimination E...

Recent work has shown that by 11 months, infants process sounds differently depending on whether they are in an allophonic relationship in the infants' ambient language (i.e., nasal and oral vowels in American English) or a phonemic one (i.e., nasal and oral vowels in Quebec French; Seidl et al., 2009). Previous experimental work suggests that adults' perceptual similarity and lexical access is...

While production studies of allophonic variation are now commonplace, we still do not have a clear understanding of how and if native speakers perceive subphonemic differences. This project experimentally investigates the perception of the variable process of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Spanish and shows that, while distinct from categorical perception, allophonic perception is displayed by lis...

The present paper investigated the perception of four Punjabi liquids /ɾ ɽ l ɭ/ and two stops /d ɖ/ by Japanese listeners. It has been reported that Japanese listeners have difficulty in perceiving the two-way liquid contrast of English because Japanese has only one liquid phoneme. Japanese /r/ has, in fact, a rich allophonic inventory. However, no detailed perception studies have been conducte...

This paper proposes simultaneous decoding using multiple utterances to derive one or more allophonic transcriptions for each word. Three possible simultaneous decoding algorithms, namely the N-best-based algorithm, the forward-backward-based algorithm and the word-network-based algorithm, are outlined. The proposed word-network-based algorithm can incrementally decode a transcription from any n...

This study investigates the psychological reality of the phonological representations of two Mandarin fricatives [s] and [ɕ] by comparing these sounds with a contrastive sound [f], and with the same sounds in Korean in which the two sounds are allophonic. Three tasks were employed to test contrast/allophony in perceiving and processing [ɕ] and [s]: discrimination on a continuum, similarity rati...

Most consonants in the Romanian inventory are claimed to have a surface palatalized counterpart carrying functional meaning; it is not clear, however, whether the set of palatalized consonants is represented underlyingly. The present study investigated the perception of palatalized consonants based on two experiments. It was found that native speakers can discriminate between plain and palatali...

This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect Bumthang, language central Bhutan. Examining allomorphy shows persistence exceptions to historical sound changes contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, reveals striking contrasts with culturally dominant Tibetic languages area. We examine ways which some is motivated by patterns seen phonology more widel...

Neural investigations suggest that there are three possible core deficits in dyslexia: phonemic, grapho-phonemic, and graphemic. These investigations also suggest that the phonemic deficit resides in a different mode of speech perception which is based on allophonic (subphonemic) units rather than phonemic units. Here we review the results of remediation methods that tap into each of these core...