The high front rounded vowel [y] is usually borrowed into Russian as /u/ with palatalization of the preceding consonant: e.g. /mɛnu/ < Fr. menu, /dunɑ/ < Germ. Düne. Paradis (2006) argues that this poses a problem for the phonetic view on loanword adaptation, claiming that /Cu/ sequences are “cross-linguistically rare” and “perceptually unnatural”. She further argues that only the phonological ...

Acoustic representation of speech provided by phonetics, spectrogram, is noisy representation in that it shows every acoustic aspect of speech. Age, gender, shape, microphone, room, line, etc. are completely irrelevant to the pronunciation assessment. However, the spectrogram is affected inevitably by these factors. Recently, a novel acoustic representation of speech was proposed, where dimensi...

Phonetics attempts to describe and understand how speech is produced and perceived; phonology attempts to understand the patterning—in general, the behavior—of speech sounds in particular languages and in all languages. Is phonetics part of phonology? This straightforward question has received various answers at different points in the history of linguistics. In this paper I attempt to document...

The neural substrates underlying speech perception are still not well understood. Previously, we found dissociation of speech and nonspeech processing at the earliest cortical level (AI), using speech and nonspeech complexity dimensions. Acoustic differences between speech and nonspeech stimuli in imaging studies, however, confound the search for linguistic-phonetic regions. Presently, we used ...