One of the first tasks infants have to accomplish in order to acquire their native language consists of segmenting the continuous signal into discrete categories that represent the vowels and consonants used in their language. Experimental research has shown that this segmentation is acquired during the first year of life. In particular, vowel categories are established at around 6 months (Kuhl...

In cross-language speech perception studies, the perceptual categories of a listener group are often assumed to be adequately represented by single, abstract labels, such as the position-dependent allophonic variant of a phoneme. However, listeners of different languages may also vary in their perceptual weighting of acoustic cues that signal a given phoneme, or its allophonic realization, in t...

Changes in the sound system of a language may involve many different aspects. First, phonemes may be added to an inventory, they may become obsolete, or they may change their shape. Second, allophonic rules may emerge (e.g. "voice intersonorant fricatives"), disappear, or change. Third, phonotactic restrictions may be added (e.g. no syllable-initial Iknl sequences, so that such clusters are red...

This study investigates the role linguistic experience has on the perception of phonation and acoustic properties that correlate with this perception. Listeners from Gujarati (contrasts breathy versus modal vowels), Spanish (no breathiness) and English (allophonic breathiness) participated in: (1) a similarityrating task, indicating the similarity of modal and/or breathy Mazatec vowels and (2) ...

All pronunciation dictionaries make use of abbreviatory conventions to save space. Devices such as italicization, superscription, and parenthesization make it possible to cater for several different phonetic forms without retranscribing the whole of the variant pronunciation. The three currently available pronunciation dictionaries of English are EPD, LPD and ODP. They all exploit the possibili...