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• Between the Mandarin flat-falling tonal contrast, F0 range imitation is non-linear while duration imitation is linear. • Phonological contrast mediates the imitation of 'supra-segmental' features. • Phonological mediation on imitation is dependent on cue primacy. • A Bayesian mixture model is used to examine the categorical imitation pattern. Phonetic imitation has been found to be mediated by phonological contrast. For features whose values vary around a phonological prototype, the imitation is distorted by the phonological category, i.e., the imitation is nonlinear. This phonological mediation effect was mostly found in segmental features such as VOT and formants. Supra-segmental features, on the contrary, are generally found to be easy to imitate, i.e., the imitation is linear. Nevertheless, whether the phonological effect exists in the imitation of supra-segmental features is not fully understood. This study, through an imitation experiment of Mandarin flat-falling tonal continua, examined whether a supra-segmental feature would be linearly imitated when it is the primary cue (F0 range) and the non-primary cue (duration) to the tonal contrast, respectively. Results showed that F0 range imitation was non-linear while duration imitation was linear. This reveals that the phonological effect is stronger in mediating imitation than would be predicted by the general hypothesis that supra-segmental features are easier to imitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how individuals’ second language cue weighting strategies change over time and across different contrasts. The study investigates the developmental changes in perceptual cue weighting of two English vowel contrasts (/i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/) by adult and child Korean learners of English during their first year of immersion in Canada. Longitudinal results revealed that adult learners had an initial advantage in L2 perceptual acquisition over children at least for the /i/-/ɪ/ contrast, but after one year some children showed greater improvements especially on the more difficult /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast. Both groups of Korean learners showed different acquisition patterns between the two vowel contrasts: they used both spectral and duration cues to distinguish /i/-/ɪ/ but generally only duration to distinguish /ɛ/-/æ/. By examining cue weights over time, this study partially confirmed the hypothesized developmental stages for the acquisition of L2 vowels first proposed by Escudero (2000) for Spanish learners of English. However, some unpredicted patterns were also identified. Most importantly, the longitudinal results suggest that individual differences in cue weighting are not merely random variability in the learner’s response patterns, but are systematically associated with the developmental trajectories of individual learners and those trajectories vary according to vowel contrast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Two parallel acoustic analyses were performed for French and English sibilant sequences, based on comparably structured read-speech corpora. They comprised all sequences of voiced and voiceless alveolar and postalveolar sibilants that can occur across word boundaries in the two languages, as well as the individual alveolar and postalveolar sibilants, combined with preceding or following labial consonants across word boundaries. The individual sibilants provide references in order to determine type and degree of place assimilation in the sequences. Based on duration and centre-of-gravity measurements that were taken for each sibilant and sibilant sequence, we found clear evidence for place assimilation not only for English, but also for French. In both languages the assimilation manifested itself gradually in the time as well as in the frequency domain. However, while in English assimilation occurred strictly regressively and primarily towards postalveolar, French assimilation was solely towards postalveolar, but in both regressive and progressive directions. Apart from these basic differences, the degree of assimilation in French and English was independent of simultaneous voice assimilation but varied considerably between the individual speakers. Overall, the context-dependent and speaker-specific assimilation patterns match well with previous findings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Phonemically-identical English true and pseudo prefixes differ in phonetic detail. • Eye movements show listeners use this detail in real time to predict word identity. • Effects reduced during the task as participants learned about cue availability. • Rhythmic properties of true prefixes may help listeners identify them as morphemes. An eye-tracking experiment tested the hypothesis that listeners use within-word fine phonetic detail that systematically reflects morphological structure, when the phonemes are identical (dis in discolour (true prefix) vs. discover (pseudo prefix)) and when they differ (re-cover vs. recover). Spoken sentence pairs, identical up to at least the critical word (e.g. I'd be surprised if the boys discolour/discover it), were cross-spliced at the prefix-stem boundary to produce stimuli in which the critical syllable's acoustics either matched or mismatched the sentence continuation. On each trial listeners heard one sentence, and selected one of two photographs depicting the pair. Matched and mismatched stimuli were heard in separate sessions, at least a week apart. Matched stimuli led to more looks to the target photograph overall and time-course analysis suggested this was true at the earliest moments. We also observed stronger effects for earlier trials and the effects tended to weaken over the course of the experiment. These results suggest that normal speech perception involves continuously monitoring phonetic detail, and, when it is systematically associated with meaning, using it to facilitate rapid understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Listeners flexibly adjusted phonetic categorization to adapt to unfamiliar phonetic categories. • Listeners increased reliance on a secondary acoustic cue when a primary cue is not informative. • There were considerable individual differences in adaptation patterns. • Individual differences in inhibitory control was related to the amount of adaptation. • Individual differences in phoneme categorization gradiency were not linked to their adaptation patterns. The present study examines whether listeners flexibly adapt to unfamiliar speech patterns such as those encountered in foreign-accented English vowels, where the relative informativeness of primary (spectral quality) and secondary (duration) cues tends to be reversed (e.g., spectrally similar but exaggerated duration differences between bet and bat). This study further tests whether listeners' adaptive strategies are related to individual differences in phoneme categorization gradiency and cognitive abilities. Native English listeners (N = 36) listened to a continuum of vowels from /ɛ/ to /æ/ (as in head and had) varying in spectral and duration values to complete a perceptual adaptation task and a visual analog scaling (VAS) task. Participants also completed cognitive tasks examining executive function capacities. Results showed that listeners mostly used spectral quality to signal vowel category at baseline, but flexibly adapted by up-weighting reliance on duration when spectral quality became no longer diagnostic. In the VAS task, some listeners made more categorical responses while others made more gradient responses in vowel categorization, but these differences were not linked to their adaptive patterns. Results of cognitive tasks revealed that individual differences in inhibitory control correlated, to some degree, with the amount of adaptation. Together, these findings suggest that listeners flexibly adapt to unfamiliar speech categories using distributional information in the input and individual differences in cognitive abilities may influence their adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the origin, progression, and impact of a sound change in Seoul Korean where the primary cue to a stop contrast in phrase-initial position is shifting from VOT to f0. Because it shares similarities with the initial phase of tonogenesis, investigating this “quasi-tonogenetic” sound change provides insight into the nature of the emergence of contrastive f0 in “tonogenetic” sound changes more generally. Using a dataset from a large apparent-time corpus of Seoul Korean, we built mixed-effects regression models of VOT and f0 to examine the time-course of change, focusing on word frequency and vowel height effects. We found that both VOT contrast reduction and f0 contrast enhancement are more advanced in high-frequency words and in stops before non-high vowels, indicating that the change is spreading across words and phonetic contexts in parallel. Furthermore, speakers suppress non-contrastive variation in f0 as f0 emerges as a primary cue. Our findings suggest that one impetus for tonogenetic change is production bias coupled with an adaptive link between the cues. We further discuss the role of Korean intonational phonology on f0 which may help explain why the phonetic precondition leads to change in Seoul Korean but not in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Phonetic training can enable learners to distinguish between non-native phonemes. • Seminal studies propose that high talker variability (HV) is key to generalisation. • We conducted a replication (N = 166) of seminal studies to test for such a HV benefit. • All evidence for a HV benefit was ambiguous, contradicting original findings. • Our study raises questions about the true size and robustness of the HV benefit. Acquiring non-native speech contrasts can be difficult. A seminal study by Logan, Lively and Pisoni (1991) established the effectiveness of phonetic training for improving non-native speech perception: Japanese learners of English were trained to perceive /r/-/l/ using minimal pairs over 15 training sessions. A pre/post-test design established learning and generalisation. In a follow-up study, Lively, Logan and Pisoni (1993) presented further evidence which suggested that talker variability in training stimuli was crucial in leading to greater generalisation. These findings have been very influential and "high variability phonetic training" is now a standard methodology in the field. However, while the general benefit of phonetic training is well replicated, the evidence for an advantage of high over lower variability training remains mixed. In a large-scale replication of the original studies using updated statistical analyses we test whether learners generalise more after phonetic training using multiple talkers over a single talker. We find that listeners learn in both multiple and single talker conditions. However, in training, we find no difference in how well listeners learn for high vs low variability training. When comparing generalisation to novel talkers after training in relation to pre-training accuracy, we find ambiguous evidence for a high-variability benefit over low-variability training: This means that if a high-variability benefit exists, the effect is much smaller than originally thought, such that it cannot be detected in our sample of 166 listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]