in this research a number of important and active phonological processes in standard german, spoken in berlin, have been studied. in this regard, four dictionaries: duden universal w?rterbuch (1998), langenscheidt (2002), brock haus (1996), and panbeh-chi (1379) have been used for gathering the data. furthermore, two german informants had a four-hour interview to complete the data. in addition,...

Lenition can be considered a process of consonant weakening, such that there is less contrast between consonants and adjacent vowels. In the evolution of Spanish from Latin, the lenition process for stops follows a predictable pattern in the direction from voiceless stops to voiced stops to fricative and approximant realizations, which may end in deletion in the most extreme cases. While presen...

Listeners flexibly recalibrate the perceptual categorization of sounds in response to speakers’ unusual pronunciation variants. Recent studies have shown that generalization of this recalibration can inform us about the nature of prelexical units used for speech perception. The present study tested whether this generalization is sensitive to phonetic or phonological properties of speech. Using ...

1 Introduction The phonetic or articulatory difference impedes the perception of certain English sounds produced by native Japanese speakers; English voiceless stops fall under this category of sounds. English voiceless stops are characterized by aspiration in articulation, whereas their Japanese counterparts are known to be unaspirated. As Cruttenden (2001) and Jenkins (2000) point out to lear...

This paper presents the results of an investigation of the fortis-lenis contrast in Fenno-Swedish stops. The data show that in utterance-initial position, the two-way contrast is realised as a contrast between unaspirated and prevoiced stops. Word-medially and finally, the contrast is that of voiceless, unaspirated stops and fully voiced stops. Fenno-Swedish is thus another Germanic language, l...

The independence or interaction between the L1 and L2 phonetic/phonological systems in bilingualism has been a challenging question. This study aims to add to previous literature by investigating voice onset time (VOT) of word initial /p, t, k, b, d, g/ by Greek-German bilingual children. A key factor also examined is the influence of language exposure on VOT variation. Twelve bilingual childre...

Many languages exhibit a voicing distinction with two series of stops, voiced and voiceless, which differ primarily in the relative timing between the consonantal release and the onset of laryngeal vibration, known as voice onset time (VOT) (Lisker and Abramson, 1964). While the exact implementation of VOT for the voicing contrast differs among languages, long lag VOTs, with a long delay betwee...

We investigated the effect of high-variability training (HVT) on the production and perception of French bilabial voiced and voiceless stops by German native speakers. Stop consonants in the two languages differ with respect to several articulatory and acoustic features. German learners of French (Experiment Group) trained the perception of word-initial bilabial stops spoken by six French nativ...