In Italian, effects of age of acquisition (AoA) have been found in object naming, semantic categorization of words and lexical decision, but not in word naming (reading aloud). The lack of an AoA effect in Italian word naming is replicated in Experiment 1 which involved reading aloud two-syllable words which all have regular spelling-sound correspondences and regular stress patterns. Studies of...

According to the C/D model, the base function for each utterance comprises a skeletal structure represented by a syllable-boundary pulse train and melodic control functions that are linked to individual syllables. The melody includes vocalic, tonal, and some other control variables. The concept of prosody may be generalized to include all base function aspects according to this concept. Melodic...

We examined cross-language differences in neural encoding and tracking of intensity and pitch cues signaling English stress patterns. Auditory mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded in English and Mandarin listeners in response to contrastive English pseudowords whose primary stress occurred either on the first or second syllable (i.e., "nocTICity" vs. "NOCticity"). The contrastive syllable...

Across species, complex circuits inside the basal ganglia (BG) converge on pallidal output neurons that exhibit movement-locked firing patterns. Yet the origins of these firing patterns remain poorly understood. In songbirds during vocal babbling, BG output neurons homologous to those found in the primate internal pallidal segment are uniformly activated in the tens of milliseconds prior to syl...

Contrastive emphasis as elicited from a semi-spontaneous dialogue paradigm was studied with respect to pitch accents and syllable magnitude. In this study, syllable magnitude is defined within the C/D model framework whereby the magnitude of the syllable is related to the displacement of the jaw from the occlusal plane. Articulatory data were collected using the x-ray microbeam facility at the ...

Two visual world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. Experiment 1 showed that phonemically overlapping words with different initial stress patterns compete for recognition. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that fundamental frequency and syllable timing patterns across material precedin...

We address the unexplored problem of percussion pattern discovery in Indian art music. Percussion in Indian art music uses onomatopoeic oralmnemonic syllables for the transmission of repertoire and technique. This is utilized for the task of percussion pattern discovery from audio recordings. From a parallel corpus of audio and expert curated scores for 38 tabla solo recordings, we use the scor...

Adult zebra finch songs consist of stereotyped sequences of syllables. Although some behavioral and physiological data suggest that songs are structured hierarchically, there is also evidence that they are driven by nonhierarchical, clock-like bursting in the premotor nucleus HVC (used as a proper name). In this study, we developed a semiautomated template-matching algorithm to identify repeate...

Articulatory duration of vowels is often measured as the duration from jaw closure maximum to jaw closure maximum, flanking the production of the syllable nucleus. However, this method may not necessarily represent articulatory syllable duration, since the actual onset/offset of the syllable depends on the specific articulator (lip, tongue) that implements the articulation of the syllable onset...

This paper investigates how different syllable affiliations of intervocalic /st/ cluster affect vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English. Very few studies have examined the effect of syllable structure on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Previous studies show that onset and coda consonants differ acoustically, articulatorily, perceptually and typologically. Onsets are stronger, more stable, more ...