Allophonic rules are responsible for the great variety in phoneme realizations. Infants can not reliably infer abstract word representations without knowledge of their native allophonic grammar. We explore the hypothesis that some properties of infants’ input, referred to as indicators, are correlated with allophony. First, we provide an extensive evaluation of individual indicators that rely o...

acoustic analysis consonants. See entries ‘acoustics’ under approximants/fricatives/laterals/nasals/ rhotics/stops measurement. See under Praat preparing data for analysis, 123–124 spectrograms and waveforms, 136, 137 vowels. See vowels: acoustics allophones acquiring allophonic distributions, 202, 213 acquiring TL phonemes that are L1 allophones, 148, 217, 241–244 learning a new allophonic dis...

In the article “Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals” Barlow (2014) presents production data of /l/ from two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals, who differ on age of acquisition of English (before 5 years or after 6 years of age). Barlow’s contribution is a welcome addition to the relatively understudied field of allophone acquisition by second language learners. In ...

It is well known that phonemes have different acoustic/phonetic realizations depending on the context. For example, the phoneme / t / is typically realized with a different allophone (phonetic variant) in syllable initial position than in syllable final position. In syllable initial position (e.g., Lorn), / t / is almost always released (with a strong burst of energy) and aspirated (with / h / ...

This paper presents the design methodology for the bilingual pronunciation dictionary of sound reference usage, which reflects the cross-linguistic, dialectal, first language (L1) interfered, biological and allophonic variations. The design methodology features 1) the comprehensive coverage of allophonic variation, 2) concise data entry composed of a balanced distribution of dialects, genders, ...

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as "categorical perception," is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all potential phoneme categories in the world's language...