Publications

Displaying 1 - 55 of 55
  • Adank, P., Smits, R., & Van Hout, R. (2003). Modeling perceived vowel height, advancement, and rounding. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 647-650). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Allerhand, M., Butterfield, S., Cutler, A., & Patterson, R. (1992). Assessing syllable strength via an auditory model. In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics: Vol. 14 Part 6 (pp. 297-304). St. Albans, Herts: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2003). The adverbial formation in mente in Vulgar and Late Latin: A problem in grammaticalization. In H. Solin, M. Leiwo, & H. Hallo-aho (Eds.), Latin vulgaire, latin tardif VI (pp. 439-457). Hildesheim: Olms.
  • Chen, A. (2003). Language dependence in continuation intonation. In M. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS.) (pp. 1069-1072). Rundle Mall, SA, Austr.: Causal Productions Pty.
  • Chen, A. (2003). Reaction time as an indicator to discrete intonational contrasts in English. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 97-100).

    Abstract

    This paper reports a perceptual study using a semantically motivated identification task in which we investigated the nature of two pairs of intonational contrasts in English: (1) normal High accent vs. emphatic High accent; (2) early peak alignment vs. late peak alignment. Unlike previous inquiries, the present study employs an on-line method using the Reaction Time measurement, in addition to the measurement of response frequencies. Regarding the peak height continuum, the mean RTs are shortest for within-category identification but longest for across-category identification. As for the peak alignment contrast, no identification boundary emerges and the mean RTs only reflect a difference between peaks aligned with the vowel onset and peaks aligned elsewhere. We conclude that the peak height contrast is discrete but the previously claimed discreteness of the peak alignment contrast is not borne out.
  • Cho, T. (2003). Lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundaries in the realization of domain-initial stops in Dutch. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhs 2003) (pp. 2657-2660). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study examines the effects of prosodic boundaries, lexical stress, and phrasal accent on the acoustic realization of stops (/t, d/) in Dutch, with special attention paid to language-specificity in the phonetics-prosody interface. The results obtained from various acoustic measures show systematic phonetic variations in the production of /t d/ as a function of prosodic position, which may be interpreted as being due to prosodicallyconditioned articulatory strengthening. Shorter VOTs were found for the voiceless stop /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (as opposed to longer VOTs in this position in English). The results suggest that prosodically-driven phonetic realization is bounded by a language-specific phonological feature system.
  • Cutler, A., Murty, L., & Otake, T. (2003). Rhythmic similarity effects in non-native listening? In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (PCPhS 2003) (pp. 329-332). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. This language-specificity affects listening to non- native speech, if native procedures are applied even though inefficient for the non-native language. However, speakers of two languages with similar rhythmic interpretation should segment their own and the other language similarly. This was observed to date only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report experiments in which Japanese listeners heard Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese, and Telugu listeners heard Japanese. In both cases detection of target sequences in speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. These results suggest that Telugu and Japanese listeners use similar procedures in segmenting speech, and support the idea that languages fall into rhythmic classes, with aspects of phonological structure affecting listeners' speech segmentation.
  • Cutler, A., & Fear, B. D. (1991). Categoricality in acceptability judgements for strong versus weak vowels. In J. Llisterri (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles (pp. 18.1-18.5). Barcelona, Catalonia: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

    Abstract

    A distinction between strong and weak vowels can be drawn on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. An experiment was conducted in which sets of contextually matched word-intial vowels ranging from clearly strong to clearly weak were cross-spliced, and the naturalness of the resulting words was rated by listeners. The ratings showed that in general cross-spliced words were only significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when schwa was not involved; this supports a categorical distinction based on vowel quality.
  • Cutler, A., Kearns, R., Norris, D., & Scott, D. (1992). Listeners’ responses to extraneous signals coincident with English and French speech. In J. Pittam (Ed.), Proceedings of the 4th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 666-671). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    English and French listeners performed two tasks - click location and speeded click detection - with both English and French sentences, closely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were located more accurately in open- than in closed-class words in both English and French; they were detected more rapidly in open- than in closed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level linguistic processing was not involved in these tasks.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). Productivity in word formation. In J. Kreiman, & A. E. Ojeda (Eds.), Papers from the Sixteenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 45-51). Chicago, Ill.: CLS.
  • Cutler, A. (1991). Prosody in situations of communication: Salience and segmentation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 1 (pp. 264-270). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, Service des publications.

    Abstract

    Speakers and listeners have a shared goal: to communicate. The processes of speech perception and of speech production interact in many ways under the constraints of this communicative goal; such interaction is as characteristic of prosodic processing as of the processing of other aspects of linguistic structure. Two of the major uses of prosodic information in situations of communication are to encode salience and segmentation, and these themes unite the contributions to the symposium introduced by the present review.
  • Cutler, A., & Robinson, T. (1992). Response time as a metric for comparison of speech recognition by humans and machines. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 189-192). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    The performance of automatic speech recognition systems is usually assessed in terms of error rate. Human speech recognition produces few errors, but relative difficulty of processing can be assessed via response time techniques. We report the construction of a measure analogous to response time in a machine recognition system. This measure may be compared directly with human response times. We conducted a trial comparison of this type at the phoneme level, including both tense and lax vowels and a variety of consonant classes. The results suggested similarities between human and machine processing in the case of consonants, but differences in the case of vowels.
  • Declerck, T., Cunningham, H., Saggion, H., Kuper, J., Reidsma, D., & Wittenburg, P. (2003). MUMIS - Advanced information extraction for multimedia indexing and searching digital media - Processing for multimedia interactive services. 4th European Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS), 553-556.
  • Doherty, M., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (1991). Übersetzung [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (84).
  • Drude, S. (2003). Advanced glossing: A language documentation format and its implementation with Shoebox. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002). Paris: ELRA.

    Abstract

    This paper presents Advanced Glossing, a proposal for a general glossing format designed for language documentation, and a specific setup for the Shoebox-program that implements Advanced Glossing to a large extent. Advanced Glossing (AG) goes beyond the traditional Interlinear Morphemic Translation, keeping syntactic and morphological information apart from each other in separate glossing tables. AG provides specific lines for different kinds of annotation – phonetic, phonological, orthographical, prosodic, categorial, structural, relational, and semantic, and it allows for gradual and successive, incomplete, and partial filling in case that some information may be irrelevant, unknown or uncertain. The implementation of AG in Shoebox sets up several databases. Each documented text is represented as a file of syntactic glossings. The morphological glossings are kept in a separate database. As an additional feature interaction with lexical databases is possible. The implementation makes use of the interlinearizing automatism provided by Shoebox, thus obtaining the table format for the alignment of lines in cells, and for semi-automatic filling-in of information in glossing tables which has been extracted from databases
  • Drude, S. (2003). Digitizing and annotating texts and field recordings in the Awetí project. In Proceedings of the EMELD Language Digitization Project Conference 2003. Workshop on Digitizing and Annotating Text and Field Recordings, LSA Institute, Michigan State University, July 11th -13th.

    Abstract

    Digitizing and annotating texts and field recordings Given that several initiatives worldwide currently explore the new field of documentation of endangered languages, the E-MELD project proposes to survey and unite procedures, techniques and results in order to achieve its main goal, ''the formulation and promulgation of best practice in linguistic markup of texts and lexicons''. In this context, this year's workshop deals with the processing of recorded texts. I assume the most valuable contribution I could make to the workshop is to show the procedures and methods used in the Awetí Language Documentation Project. The procedures applied in the Awetí Project are not necessarily representative of all the projects in the DOBES program, and they may very well fall short in several respects of being best practice, but I hope they might provide a good and concrete starting point for comparison, criticism and further discussion. The procedures to be exposed include: * taping with digital devices, * digitizing (preliminarily in the field, later definitely by the TIDEL-team at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen), * segmenting and transcribing, using the transcriber computer program, * translating (on paper, or while transcribing), * adding more specific annotation, using the Shoebox program, * converting the annotation to the ELAN-format developed by the TIDEL-team, and doing annotation with ELAN. Focus will be on the different types of annotation. Especially, I will present, justify and discuss Advanced Glossing, a text annotation format developed by H.-H. Lieb and myself designed for language documentation. It will be shown how Advanced Glossing can be applied using the Shoebox program. The Shoebox setup used in the Awetí Project will be shown in greater detail, including lexical databases and semi-automatic interaction between different database types (jumping, interlinearization). ( Freie Universität Berlin and Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.)
  • Duffield, N., & Matsuo, A. (2003). Factoring out the parallelism effect in ellipsis: An interactional approach? In J. Chilar, A. Franklin, D. Keizer, & I. Kimbara (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) (pp. 591-603). Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.

    Abstract

    Traditionally, there have been three standard assumptions made about the Parallelism Effect on VP-ellipsis, namely that the effect is categorical, that it applies asymmetrically and that it is uniquely due to syntactic factors. Based on the results of a series of experiments involving online and offline tasks, it will be argued that the Parallelism Effect is instead noncategorical and interactional. The factors investigated include construction type, conceptual and morpho-syntactic recoverability, finiteness and anaphor type (to test VP-anaphora). The results show that parallelism is gradient rather than categorical, effects both VP-ellipsis and anaphora, and is influenced by both structural and non-structural factors.
  • Janse, E. (2003). Word perception in natural-fast and artificially time-compressed speech. In M. SolÉ, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3001-3004).
  • Johnson, E. K. (2003). Speaker intent influences infants' segmentation of potentially ambiguous utterances. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (PCPhS 2003) (pp. 1995-1998). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of function assignment. In Proceedings of AMLaP 2003 (pp. 153-154). Glasgow: Glasgow University.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1980). Argumentation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (38/39).
  • Klein, W., & Franceschini, R. (Eds.). (2003). Einfache Sprache [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 131.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1992). Textlinguistik [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (86).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1975). Sprache ausländischer Arbeiter [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (18).
  • Kuzla, C. (2003). Prosodically-conditioned variation in the realization of domain-final stops and voicing assimilation of domain-initial fricatives in German. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2829-2832). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • De Lange, F. P., Hagoort, P., & Toni, I. (2003). Differential fronto-parietal contributions to visual and motor imagery. NeuroImage, 19(2), e2094-e2095.

    Abstract

    Mental imagery is a cognitive process crucial to human reasoning. Numerous studies have characterized specific
    instances of this cognitive ability, as evoked by visual imagery (VI) or motor imagery (MI) tasks. However, it
    remains unclear which neural resources are shared between VI and MI, and which are exclusively related to MI.
    To address this issue, we have used fMRI to measure human brain activity during performance of VI and MI
    tasks. Crucially, we have modulated the imagery process by manipulating the degree of mental rotation necessary
    to solve the tasks. We focused our analysis on changes in neural signal as a function of the degree of mental
    rotation in each task.
  • De León, L., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (1992). Space in Mesoamerican languages [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, 45(6).
  • Levelt, C. C., Fikkert, P., & Schiller, N. O. (2003). Metrical priming in speech production. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2481-2485). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel – MOtor vs. koSTUUM – MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime – target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1991). Lexical access in speech production: Stages versus cascading. In H. Peters, W. Hulstijn, & C. Starkweather (Eds.), Speech motor control and stuttering (pp. 3-10). Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some psychologists' reactions to the Symposium of Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception. In A. Cohen, & S. Nooteboom (Eds.), Structure and process in speech perception (pp. 345-351). Berlin: Springer.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cho, T. (2003). The use of domain-initial strengthening in segmentation of continuous English speech. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2993-2996). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1992). Words within words: Lexical statistics and lexical access. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 221-224). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    This paper presents lexical statistics on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in other words. We report the results of an analysis of 25000 words, varying in length from two to six syllables, extracted from a phonetically-coded English dictionary (The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Each syllable, and each string of syllables within each word was checked against the dictionary. Two analyses are presented: the first used a complete list of polysyllables, with look-up on the entire dictionary; the second used a sublist of content words, counting only embedded words which were themselves content words. The results have important implications for models of human speech recognition. The efficiency of these models depends, in different ways, on the number and location of words within words.
  • Meeuwissen, M., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). Naming analog clocks conceptually facilitates naming digital clocks. In Proceedings of XIII Conference of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP 2003) (pp. 271-271).
  • Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Using the structure found in time: Building real-scale orthographic and phonetic representations by accumulation of expectations. In H. Bowman, & C. Labiouse (Eds.), Connectionist Models of Cognition, Perception and Emotion: Proceedings of the Eighth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (pp. 263-272). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Norris, D., Van Ooijen, B., & Cutler, A. (1992). Speeded detection of vowels and steady-state consonants. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing; Vol. 2 (pp. 1055-1058). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    We report two experiments in which vowels and steady-state consonants served as targets in a speeded detection task. In the first experiment, two vowels were compared with one voiced and once unvoiced fricative. Response times (RTs) to the vowels were longer than to the fricatives. The error rate was higher for the consonants. Consonants in word-final position produced the shortest RTs, For the vowels, RT correlated negatively with target duration. In the second experiment, the same two vowel targets were compared with two nasals. This time there was no significant difference in RTs, but the error rate was still significantly higher for the consonants. Error rate and length correlated negatively for the vowels only. We conclude that RT differences between phonemes are independent of vocalic or consonantal status. Instead, we argue that the process of phoneme detection reflects more finely grained differences in acoustic/articulatory structure within the phonemic repertoire.
  • Oostdijk, N., & Broeder, D. (2003). The Spoken Dutch Corpus and its exploitation environment. In A. Abeille, S. Hansen-Schirra, & H. Uszkoreit (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on linguistically interpreted corpora (LINC-03) (pp. 93-101).
  • Ouni, S., Cohen, M. M., Young, K., & Jesse, A. (2003). Internationalization of a talking head. In M. Sole, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of 15th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (pp. 2569-2572). Barcelona: Casual Productions.

    Abstract

    In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., Breheny, R., & Lee, M. W. (2003). Context-independent information in concepts: An investigation of the notion of ‘core features’. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2003). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Scharenborg, O., McQueen, J. M., Ten Bosch, L., & Norris, D. (2003). Modelling human speech recognition using automatic speech recognition paradigms in SpeM. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2097-2100). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.
  • Scharenborg, O., ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2003). Recognising 'real-life' speech with SpeM: A speech-based computational model of human speech recognition. In Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2285-2288).

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.
  • Schiller, N. O. (2003). Metrical stress in speech production: A time course study. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 451-454). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.
  • Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K. (2003). Position and vowel quality effects in infant's segmentation of vowel-initial words. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2233-2236). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Senft, G. (1991). Bakavilisi Biga - we can 'turn' the language - or: What happens to English words in Kilivila language? In W. Bahner, J. Schildt, & D. Viehwegger (Eds.), Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Linguists (pp. 1743-1746). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Autonomous syntax and prelexical rules. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 89-98). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Logic and language. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 84-87). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Notes on noun phrases and quantification. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Current Issues in Computational Linguistics (pp. 19-44). Penang, Malaysia: Universiti Sains Malaysia.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). What makes a text untranslatable? In H. M. N. Noor Ein, & H. S. Atiah (Eds.), Pragmatik Penterjemahan: Prinsip, Amalan dan Penilaian Menuju ke Abad 21 ("The Pragmatics of Translation: Principles, Practice and Evaluation Moving towards the 21st Century") (pp. 19-27). Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1980). Variabele competentie: Linguïstiek en sociolinguïstiek anno 1980. In Handelingen van het 36e Nederlands Filologencongres: Gehouden te Groningen op woensdag 9, donderdag 10 en vrijdag 11 April 1980 (pp. 41-56). Amsterdam: Holland University Press.
  • Shi, R., Werker, J., & Cutler, A. (2003). Function words in early speech perception. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3009-3012).

    Abstract

    Three experiments examined whether infants recognise functors in phrases, and whether their representations of functors are phonetically well specified. Eight- and 13- month-old English infants heard monosyllabic lexical words preceded by real functors (e.g., the, his) versus nonsense functors (e.g., kuh); the latter were minimally modified segmentally (but not prosodically) from real functors. Lexical words were constant across conditions; thus recognition of functors would appear as longer listening time to sequences with real functors. Eightmonth- olds' listening times to sequences with real versus nonsense functors did not significantly differ, suggesting that they did not recognise real functors, or functor representations lacked phonetic specification. However, 13-month-olds listened significantly longer to sequences with real functors. Thus, somewhere between 8 and 13 months of age infants learn familiar functors and represent them with segmental detail. We propose that accumulated frequency of functors in input in general passes a critical threshold during this time.
  • Van Ooijen, B., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1991). Detection times for vowels versus consonants. In Eurospeech 91: Vol. 3 (pp. 1451-1454). Genova: Istituto Internazionale delle Comunicazioni.

    Abstract

    This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were detected faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the' representation of targets by subjects.
  • Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (1991). A hybrid model of human sentence processing: Parsing right-branching, center-embedded and cross-serial dependencies. In M. Tomita (Ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.
  • Wagner, A., & Braun, A. (2003). Is voice quality language-dependent? Acoustic analyses based on speakers of three different languages. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 651-654). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Weber, A., & Smits, R. (2003). Consonant and vowel confusion patterns by American English listeners. In M. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.
  • Weber, A., & Smits, R. (2003). Consonant and vowel confusion patterns by American English listeners. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 1437-1440). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signalto-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.

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