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PubMed1993

Production and perception of a novel, second-language phonetic contrast.

Four experiments, all of which focused on vowel duration, assessed Chinese subjects' production and perception of the contrast between /t/ and /d/ in the final position of English words. Vowel duration was measured in minimal pairs in the first experiment. The stimuli in natural-edited beat-bead and bat-bad continua in which vowel duration varied in 20-ms steps were then presented to native English and Chinese subjects in a forced-choice test, in an experiment using the method of adjustment, and in an imitation task. The non-natives who learned English in childhood closely resembled native speakers in all four experiments. Three groups of non-natives who had learned English as a second language in adulthood, on the other hand, differed from the native speakers. The late learners produced significantly longer vowels in words ending in /d/ than /t/. However, the late learners' vowel duration differences were much smaller than the native speakers', and were correlated significantly with degree of foreign accent in English. The late learners differed from the native speakers in several ways in the two perception experiments, and also in the imitation task. The pattern of significant and nonsignificant between-group differences, but not data for individual subjects, was consistent with the hypothesis that L2 (second language) production accuracy is limited by the adequacy of perceptual representations for sounds in the L2.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1999

Development of adaptive phonetic gestures in children: evidence from vowel devoicing in two different dialects of Japanese.

High vowels between voiceless consonants are often devoiced in many languages, as well as in many dialects of Japanese. This phenomenon can be hypothesized to be a consequence of the adaptive organization of the laryngeal gestures to various conditions, including dialectal requirements. If this theory is correct, it may be possible to predict developmental changes in vowel devoicing based on the developmental improvement in the dialect-specific organization of the laryngeal gestures. To test this expectation, the developmental properties of vowel devoicing were investigated for 72 children of 4 and 5 years of age, and 37 adults in two dialects of Japanese. One was the Osaka dialect, with a low devoicing rate, and the other the Tokyo dialect, with a high devoicing rate. In the Tokyo dialect, the devoicing rate of children significantly increased and reached an adultlike level by the age of 5 years, whereas it remained low irrespective of age in Osaka. The vowel devoicing of 5-year-old children exhibited the same characteristics as that of the adults of their respective dialect. These results suggest that children growing up with the Tokyo dialect acquire the articulatory gestures which do not inhibit vowel devoicing by the age of 5 years, whereas children growing up with the Osaka dialect acquire those which inhibit the devoicing of vowels by the same age. The results fit in well with the predictions of the gestural account of vowel devoicing. It is also suggested that learning dialect-specific adaptive strategies to coordinate voicing and devoicing gestures as required to attain an adultlike vowel devoicing pattern is a long process: By the age of 5 years children have completed enough of this process to become members of their dialectal community.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1987

Japanese quail can learn phonetic categories.

Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix) learned a category for syllable-initial [d] followed by a dozen different vowels. After learning to categorize syllables consisting of [d], [b], or [g] followed by four different vowels, quail correctly categorized syllables in which the same consonants preceded eight novel vowels. Acoustic analysis of the categorized syllables revealed no single feature or pattern of features that could support generalization, suggesting that the quail adopted a more complex mapping of stimuli into categories. These results challenge theories of speech sound classification that posit uniquely human capacities.

Animals↗
PubMed1987

Effects of lexical stress on phonetic categorization.

Three experiments investigated the use of lexical stress in auditory word recognition. Speech voicing continua were created in which lexical status resulted in one end-point constituting a real word and the other end a nonword (e.g. diGRESS-tiGRESS, in which digress is a real word, and DIgress-Tigress, in which tigress is a real word). Subjects' identification of the initial segment of these items was biased in the midrange of the continua in that they were more likely to report a segment that resulted in a real word than one that resulted in a nonword. Alternative acoustically based explanations are discounted in favor of a lexically based account of the data. Possible mechanisms underlying the effect of lexical stress on speech perception are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed2004

From orthography to phonetics: ERP measures of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion mechanisms in reading.

Neuroimaging has provided evidence that the first stages of visual word recognition activate a visual word-form center localized in the left extrastriate cortex (fusiform gyrus). Accordingly, neurological cases of patients suffering from pure alexia reported the left posterior occipital lobe as the possible locus of orthographic analysis. There is less agreement in the literature about which brain structures are involved in the subsequent stages of word processing and, in particular, their time course of activation. Functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic source imaging studies recently reported data that could indicate a dual route model of reading. These findings are particularly relevant to studies on the functional deficits associated with phonological and surface dyslexia. There is evidence for the existence of two different brain mechanisms supporting phonological processing in visual word recognition: one mechanism subserving "assembled phonology" for reading letter strings and another one subserving "addressed phonology" for reading meaningful words. However, available knowledge on the time course and neural locus of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion mechanisms in reading is still inadequate. In this study, we compared processing of meaningful and meaningless Italian words in a task requiring a phonemic/phonetic decision task. Stimuli were 1152 different orthographic stimuli presented in the central visual field. Half the stimuli were Italian words (with a high or low frequency of occurrence), the other half were meaningless strings of letters (legal pseudowords and letter strings). Event-related potentials were recorded from 28 scalp sites in 10 Italian university students. The task consisted of deciding about the presence/absence of a given "phone" in the hypothetical enunciation of word read: for example, "Is there a /k/ in cheese?". Results showed that lexical frequency and orthographical regularity affected linguistic processing within 150 msec poststimulus. Indeed, the amplitude of a centroparietal P150 varied as a function of stimulus type, being larger in response to high-frequency words than to low-frequency ones and to words and pseudowords than to letter strings. This component might index visual categorization processes and recognition of familiar objects, being highly sensitive to orthographic regularity and "ill-formedness" of words. The amplitude of the P150 was the same in response to well-formed meaningless and to meaningful words, when these latter had a low lexical frequency. This might indicate that highly familiar words are recognized as meaningful unitary visual objects at very early stages of processing, through a visual route to an orthographic input lexicon. Moreover, the amplitude of the negativity recorded between 250 and 350 msec showed an anteroposterior topographic dissociation for access to the phonemic representation of well- or ill-formed strings of characters. Brain responses were larger over the left occipito-temporal regions during reading of words and pseudowords and over the left frontal regions during reading of letter strings.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The effectiveness of a multisensory alphabetic phonetic approach with college students who are learning disabled.

College students diagnosed as learning disabled were studied to determine whether they would make more progress in a summer program if taught by an adaptation of the Orton-Gillingham (O-G) approach. Progress of those exposed to this approach was compared to progress of those exposed to (a) a nonphonetic approach or (b) no educational activity. Pre- and posttest results are reported for the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised and Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests. The subjects were 30 college students aged 17 to 24, who were diagnosed as LD. They were divided into groups of 10 and exposed to the indicated educational intervention. The O-G group was found to achieve statistically significant improvement in reading when compared to the group using the nonphonetic approach or no educational activity. No statistically significant difference was noted between the latter two groups. This study indicates that a modified O-G approach is useful in the teaching of reading to college students who are LD.

Achievement↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Phonetic coding and reading in college students with and without learning disabilities.

This study examined whether adult speech production and oral reading were related independent of auditory short-term memory and vocabulary. Forty-four university students served as subjects for the study. They ranged in age from 17 to 28 years old; 26 were men and 18 were women; 11 were students with learning disabilities and 33 were students without disabilities. All subjects were tested individually on tasks requiring multisyllabic pseudoword repetition, oral reading, memory for digits, and vocabulary. In both groups--with and without learning disabilities--significant correlations were found between pseudoword repetition accuracy and reading, suggesting that poor readers also have more inaccurate speech production. The correlations remained significant after controlling for both memory and vocabulary. A scatter plot of the speech-reading relationship showed performance overlap between groups, as well as within-group heterogeneity. Significance of the findings is discussed, and issues for future research are identified.

Adolescent↗