Looking for lexical feedback effects in /tl/→/kl/ repairs (original) (raw)
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Perceptual biases in consonant deletion
We demonstrate that adult English speakers make use of perceptual principles in medial consonant cluster deletion. Cross-linguistically, consonant cluster simplification via deletion is more likely apply to the first consonant rather than the second consonant (if both consonants are of equal sonority). Adult native English speakers, were given a two-alternative forced-choice task in which either C1 or C2 of a C1C2 cluster was deleted. When C1 and C2 were of equal sonority, participants selected C1 significantly more often than chance, but when sonority of C1 was greater than C2, participants selected C1 at chance. These results support a theory in which biases towards phonetically grounded processes shape the crosslinguistic distribution of phonological processes
2003
French listeners tend to hear illegal utterance-initial /tl/ and /dl/ clusters as /kl/ and /gl/, respectively, when speech is produced by French speakers. We re-examined this phenomenon, once called “phonotactic perceptual assimilation,” in a cross-linguistic design using Modern Hebrew. In Hebrew, virtually all the obstruent-liquid clusters are permissible, including /dl, tl/. French and Israeli listeners were tested on their discrimination performance for the /dl/-/gl/ and /tl/-/kl/ contrasts, using monosyllables such as /tla, kla/ produced by a native speaker of Hebrew. French listeners showed substantial difficulty at discriminating these contrasts –especially /tl/- /kl/– whereas Israeli listeners experienced a slight difficulty only for /tl/-/kl/. French listeners categorised as velar the initial consonant of the /tl/ items and, but much less often, that of the /dl/ items. Altogether then, the /tl/-to-/kl/ perceptual assimilation is largely language-specific. Yet, it might be partly determined by universal perceptual constraints that seem to emerge in Modern Hebrew.
Phonetic reduction, perceptual illusions, and phonotactic legality
This study probed the relationship between automatic phonotactic repair and speech production, by asking whether the repair structure (a prothetic vowel) may be susceptible to reduction in speech. Spanish productively repairs word-initial /s/-consonant clusters (henceforth #sC) with a prothetic /e/ in both production and perception. We asked whether the initial vowel in Spanish #esC words like espalda 'back', which matches the default repair vowel, is more prone to reduction than other initial vowels, such as in aspirina 'aspirin'. We explore this question in the speech production of 15 speakers of Andalusian Spanish who produced half #esC and half #asC words in isolation (588 tokens). Outright vowel deletion was uncommon, but was more likely with initial /e/ (5%) than initial /a/ (0.3%, one token). Moreover, when the /s/ was realized with greater duration (cf. the common tendency to lenite syllable-final /s/ in Andalusian), shortening of /e/, but not /a/, was observed. These findings provide evidence that reduction may be enabled when the reduced material can be perceptually repaired, leading to the occurrence of apparently illicit sequences in actual speech, e.g. espalda produced as [spalda]. The influence of articulatory, frequency, and other factors on reduction is also evaluated.
FACILITATION AND INHIBITION USING A SEGMENTAL PHONETIC PRIMING PARADIGM
2007
ABSTRACT This research explores the representation and access of lexical form during spoken word recognition. Two experiments were conducted examining segmental priming effects. In the first set of experiments, a single fricative segment functioned as a prime to targets with either a matching or mismatching fricative in initial (Experiment 1a) or final (Experiment 1b) position.
The effect of non-nativeness and background noise on lexical retuning
2015
Previous research revealed remarkable flexibility of native and non-native listeners’ perceptual system, i.e., native and non-native phonetic category boundaries can be quickly recalibrated in the face of ambiguous input. The present study investigates the limitations of the flexibility of the non-native perceptual system. In two lexically-guided perceptual learning experiments, Dutch listeners were exposed to a short story in English, where either all /l/ or all /ɹ/ sounds were replaced by an ambiguous [l/ɹ] sound. In the first experiment, the story was presented in clean, while in the second experiment, intermittent noise was added to the story, although never on the critical words. Lexically-guided perceptual learning was only observed in the clean condition. It is argued that the introduction of intermittent noise reduced the reliability of the evidence of hearing a particular word, which in turn blocked retuning of the phonetic categories.