Foreign accent is often thought to be the result of an age-related diminution in the ability to learn to pronounce languages. Existing studies of L2 pronunciation, however, do not seem to support the claim that there is some fundamental difference between children and adults in phonetic learning ability. The continued presence of foreign accent may instead be a consequence of the establishment ...

Sounds are essential to how humans perceive and interact with the world and are captured in recordings and shared on the Internet on a minute-by-minute basis. These recordings, which are predominantly videos, constitute the largest archive of sounds we know. However, most of these recordings have undescribed content making necessary methods for automatic sound analysis, indexing and retrieval. ...

One of the first challenges that language learners face is discovering which sounds make up their language. Evidence suggests that infants learn about the phonetic categories of their language between six and twelve months, as demonstrated by reduced discrimination of non-native contrasts and enhanced discrimination of native language phonetic contrasts (Werker & Tees, 1984; Narayan, Werker, & ...

This paper reports an analysis of the production of implosive and prenasalized sounds by 6 children (3 Fulfulde and 3 Bambara) from the onset of babbling to the end of their first year. It shows that the production of implosive consonant-like sounds by the children is very early on language-specific i.e related to the presence of these consonants in the language the children are exposed to. Unl...

Fifty-six Portuguese speakers born and raised in Brazil produced words beginning one of four plosives, /p b k ?/. Twenty-eight them were monolinguals (controls), the rest learners English as a foreign language (EFL). The also asked to produce with We measured plosives’ voice onset times (VOT) address following research questions: Do foreign-language learners, whose exposure native oral input is...

Many studies on developmental speech perception (e.g. Werker & Tees 1984, Kuhl et al. 1992) have documented changes in speech perception that occur during an infant’s first year of life. These changes are generally understood to reflect the phonemic structure of the native language (Best et al. 1988, Liberman et al. 1957). There is little research, however, on the phonological abstractness of t...

This paper investigates the difference between basic psycho-acoustic auditory perception and language-specific perception of speech sounds. This was examined in two experiments with American English and Russian listeners. Results suggest that listeners' language does not influence auditory perception, but does affect the rated perceptual similarity of speech sounds.

1.1 Limiting the scope of phonology. Kinds of information conveyed by speech Sociolinguistic differences are not the same as linguistic differences What counts as a linguistic contrast 1.2 Non-linguistic aspects of speech\ Speaker attitudes, style, peronal identity Spoken language and written language The role of intonation 1.3 Universal phonetics and phonology Equating sounds in different lang...

Generative phonology has the goal of developing a comprehensive and predictive model of implicit knowledge of sound structure. In this paper, I review the nature and import of the discoveries about implicit knowledge which were made possible by modern methods for gathering experimental data and for analyzing large data sets. First, it is known that languages di er in extremely ne phonetic detai...