When items are presented sequentially, the evaluation of current item is biased by both previous item’s value (perceptual bias) and response given (response bias). While these biases have been identified in judgements facial attractiveness, it unclear as to whether they produce assimilation and/or contrast effects. Here, two tasks were employed measure each bias isolation. By presenting a prece...

Unfamiliar regional accents disrupt spoken word recognition by L2 and L1 learners and L1 adults, and confuse ASR and smart systems. Little is known, however, about which aspects of non-native accents hinder word recognition, or what processes are involved. We assessed how Australian English (AusE) listeners’ recognition of words in unfamiliar accents is affected by two types of cross-accent per...

Listeners perceptually assimilate nonnative phones to native phonemes, but do they do so with unfamiliar accents of their own language? We assessed Australian (Aus) listeners’ assimilation of vowels in two unfamiliar English accents, and whether prior short-term exposure to the other accent would yield any adaptation to its vowels. Participants categorized the vowels of nonce words spoken in Au...

Speech perception phenomena have been drawn on by researchers in the area of phonological theory to elucidate synchronic phonological processes such as neutralization (Steriade 1995, 1997), consonant/consonant metathesis (Hume 1998, 2001), place assimilation (Jun 1995), etc. It has also been found that listeners' perceptual abilities are influenced by their native language experience (e.g. Hume...

When the onsets of three successive sound bursts mark two adjacent time intervals, the second time interval can be underestimated when it is physically longer than the first time interval by up to 100 ms. This illusion, time-shrinking, is very stable when the first time interval is 200 ms or shorter (Nakajima et al., 2004, Perception, 33). Time-shrinking had been considered a kind of perceptual...

Jun (1995) and Hume (1998) incorporate perception into analysis of cross-linguistic trends in place assimilation and metathesis by claiming that the perceptual salience of specific segments motivates the ranking of relevant OT constraints. This study investigates the specific claims Jun and Hume make concerning the perceptual salience of cues for stop place of articulation to determine whether ...

Perceptual salience may motivate phonological processes such as consonant place assimilation. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test the perceptual salience of consonant place of articulation by listeners who are native speakers of Korean and by listeners who are native speakers of American English. The results, when averaged across vowels and language, reveal dorsal and labial co...

A quantitative model of implicit masking, with a front-end low-pass filter, a retinal local compressive nonlinearity described by a modified Naka-Rushton equation, a cortical representation of the image in the Fourier domain, and a frequency-dependent compressive nonlinearity, was developed to simulate visual image processing. The model algorithm was used to estimate contrast sensitivity functi...

Language experience systematically constrains perception of speech contrasts that deviate phonologically and/or phonetically from those of the listener’s native language. These effects are most dramatic in adults, but begin to emerge in infancy and undergo further development through at least early childhood. The central question addressed here is: How do nonnative speech perception findings be...