Models of speech perception have shown divergent views concerning the mechanisms that underlie perception of assimilated speech. In the present study, we evaluated an existing probabilistic model for English place assimilation and conducted a series of simulations on voice assimilated speech in French. The model was trained on a realistic acoustic-phonetic data set of word-final assimilated sto...

French listeners tend to hear illegal utterance-initial /tl/ and /dl/ clusters as /kl/ and /gl/, respectively, when speech is produced by French speakers [1, 5]. We reexamined this phenomenon, once called “phonotactic perceptual assimilation,” in a cross-linguistic design using Modern Hebrew. In Hebrew, virtually all the obstruent-liquid clusters are permissible, including /dl, tl/. French and ...

The linguistic role of subcortical structures such as the striatum is still controversial. According to the claim that language processing is subdivided into a lexical memory store and a computational rule system (Pinker, 1999) several studies on word morphology (e.g., Ullman et al., 1997) and on syntax (e.g., Teichmann et al., 2005) have suggested that the striatum is specifically dedicated to...

Millions of Foreign Language (FL) learners spend many years learning English in the classroom. Most FL learners learn English in their countries with local teachers, with little or no native L2 input. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995, 1999) and Speech Learning Model (SLM) (Flege, 1995) are the most widely used L2 models in L2 speech analysis. However, ...

Abstract The present electroencephalographical multi-speaker MMN oddball experiment was designed to study the phonological processing of German native and non-native speech sounds. Precisely, we focused on perception /ɪ-iː/, /ɛ-ɛː/, /a-aː/ fricatives [ʃ] [ç] in natives (GG) French learners (FG). As expected, our results showed that GG were able discriminate all critical vowel contrasts. In cont...

This study examined whether native English (NE) speakers perceive non-native tones of Mandarin in terms of their English intonational categories (Flat pitch, Question, Uncertainty, and Statement). The results indicated that NE listeners assimilated non-native tones to their native intonational categories, which share phonetic similarities with those ofMandarin tones. Thus, the assumption that a...

According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), articulatory similarity/dissimilarity between sounds of the second language (L2) and the native language (L1) governs L2 learnability in adulthood and predicts L2 sound perception by naïve listeners. We performed behavioral and neurophysiological experiments on two groups of university students at the first and fifth years of the English lan...

Past research has shown that the speech processing system is, under certain circumstances, relatively tolerant to surface variations in connected speech. The goal of this study is to explore regressive voice assimilation in French, a surface variation in which the voicing of a consonant is modified by the voicing of the following consonant. French subjects pronounced sentences containing words ...