Sounds that are contrastive in a language are rated by listeners as being more different from each other than sounds that don’t occur in the language or sounds that are allophones of a single phoneme. The study reported in this paper replicates this finding and adds new data on the perceptual impact of learning a language with a new contrast. Two groups of speakers of the Nanjing dialect of Man...

Thinking cap records electrical signals from the brain of one-year-old Elise Hardwick, who is helping scientists figure out how the youngest children process sounds that make up the building blocks of language.

Three English fricatives [θ], [ð], and [ʃ] have been confusing many Indonesian people when they pronounce words. Even though these three sounds are not present in Indonesian, found Arabic. The goal of the research is to reveal if Muslims, who qualified Quran teachers, able words correctly. subjects passive speakers but still get enough exposure at college. In order explore language phenomenon, ...

There is a long tradition in laboratory phonetics of describing the interaction of phonetic inventories and constraints of auditory perception and articulatory production. For example, Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) attempted to predict the inventories of typical vowel systems by appealing to the notion of maximal perceptual distinctiveness. Stevens (1989) explained the makeup of these inventor...

What is Fast ForWord Language Software? Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord Language is an adaptive computer program that is CD-ROM and internet-based. Drawing on 25 years of research on brain plasticity and the neurological basis of language, scientists developed the Fast ForWord Language product in an attempt to provide training in oral language comprehension and other skills critical for succ...

Children with dyslexia may read poorly for several reasons. Recent research suggests that in addition to skills with language sounds, visual-spatial attention may be an important predictor of reading abilities.

Conclusions The result suggested that mother tongue Japanese and non- mother tongue Japanese differ in their pattern of brain dominance when listening to sounds from the natural world-in particular, insect sounds. These results reveal significant support for previous findings from Tsunoda (in 1970). Objectives This study concentrates on listeners who show clear evidence of a 'speech' brain vs a...

The evolutionary origin of human language and its neurobiological foundations has long been the object of intense scientific debate. Although a number of theories have been proposed, one particularly contentious model suggests that human language evolved from a manual gestural communication system in a common ape-human ancestor. Consistent with a gestural origins theory are data indicating that...

Although aphasia is often characterized as a selective impairment in language function, left hemisphere lesions may cause impairments in semantic processing of auditory information, not only in verbal but also in nonverbal domains. We assessed the 'online' relationship between verbal and nonverbal auditory processing by examining the ability of 30 left hemisphere-damaged aphasic patients to mat...