According to a recent hypothesis, the CV pattern (i.e., the arrangement of consonant and vowel letters) constrains the mental representation of letter strings, with each vowel or vowel cluster being the core of a unit. Six experiments with the same/different task were conducted to test whether this structure is extracted prelexically. In the mismatching trials, the targets were pseudowords buil...

This study aims at investigating the perception and production of the English nasals /m/ and /n/ in syllable-final position by 20 Brazilian EFL learners and 3 native speakers of American English. Perception was assessed by means of both a discrimination and an identification test. Production data was collected by means of a Sentence Reading Test. The results from the perception tests revealed t...

There is a debate in the literature on whether the intelligibility of English second language (L2) speech is more affected, among other things, by incorrect vowel reduction or by incorrect word stress placement. Identifying which features interfere most with intelligibility will assist in selecting what to prioritize in teaching pronunciation. The focus of ...

Four experiments explored the relative contributions of spectral content and phonetic labeling in effects of context on vowel perception. Two 10-step series of CVC syllables ([bVb] and [dVd]) varying acoustically in F2 midpoint frequency and varying perceptually in vowel height from [delta] to [epsilon] were synthesized. In a forced-choice identification task, listeners more often labeled vowel...

Identification functions of 20 initial and 20 final consonants were characterized in 9600 randomly sampled consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) tokens presented in speech-spectrum noise. Because of differences in the response criteria for different consonants, signal detection measures were used to quantify identifiability. Consonant-specific baseline signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were adjusted to p...

Swedish learners’ perception of Japanese quantity was investigated by means of an identification task. Swedish informants performed similarly to native Japanese listeners in short/long identification of both vowel and consonant. The Swedish and Japanese listeners reacted similarly both to the durational variation and to the F0 change despite the different use of F0 fall in relation with quantit...