Auditory training has been shown to be effective in the identification of non-native segmental distinctions. In this study, it was investigated whether such training is applicable to the acquisition of non-native suprasegmental contrasts, i.e., Mandarin tones. Using the high-variability paradigm, eight American learners of Mandarin were trained in eight sessions during the course of two weeks to identify the four tones in natural words produced by native Mandarin talkers. The trainees' identification accuracy revealed an average 21% increase from the pretest to the post-test, and the improvement gained in training was generalized to new stimuli ͑18% increase͒ and to new talkers and stimuli ͑25% increase͒. Moreover, the six-month retention test showed that the improvement was retained long after training by an average 21% increase from the pretest. The results are discussed in terms of non-native suprasegmental perceptual modification, and the analogies between L2 acquisition processes at the segmental and suprasegmental levels.

Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones has been shown to be effective, with trainees' identification improving by 21%. Improvement also generalized to new stimuli and new talkers, and was retained when tested six months after training ͓Y. Wang et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 3649-3658 ͑1999͔͒. The present study investigates whether the tone contrasts gained perceptually transferred to production. Before their perception pretest and after their post-test, the trainees were recorded producing a list of Mandarin words. Their productions were first judged by native Mandarin listeners in an identification task. Identification of trainees' post-test tone productions improved by 18% relative to their pretest productions, indicating significant tone production improvement after perceptual training. Acoustic analyses of the pre-and post-training productions further reveal the nature of the improvement, showing that post-training tone contours approximate native norms to a greater degree than pretraining tone contours. Furthermore, pitch height and pitch contour are not mastered in parallel, with the former being more resistant to improvement than the latter. These results are discussed in terms of the relationship between non-native tone perception and production as well as learning at the suprasegmental level.

Words which are expected to contain the same surface string of segments may, under identical prosodic circumstances, sometimes be realized with slight differences in duration. Some researchers have attributed such effects to differences in the words' underlying forms (incomplete neutralization), while others have suggested orthographic influence and extremely careful speech as the cause. In this paper, we demonstrate such sub-phonemic durational differences in Dutch, a language which some past research has found not to have such effects. Past literature has also shown that listeners can often make use of incomplete neutralization to distinguish apparent homophones. We extend perceptual investigations of this topic, and show that listeners can perceive even durational differences which are not consistently observed in production. We further show that a difference which is primarily orthographic rather than underlying can also create such durational differences. We conclude that a wide variety of factors, in addition to underlying form, can induce speakers to produce slight durational differences which listeners can also use in perception.

Abstract& Functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed before and after six native English speakers completed lexical tone training as part of a program to learn Mandarin as a second language. Language-related areas including Broca's area, Wernicke's area, auditory cortex, and supplementary motor regions were active in all subjects before and after training and did not vary in average location. Across all subjects, improvements in performance were associated with an increase in the spatial extent of activation in left superior temporal gyrus (Brodmann's area 22, putative Wernicke's area), the emergence of activity in adjacent Brodmann's area 42, and the emergence of activity in right inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 44), a homologue of putative Broca's area. These findings demonstrate a form of enrichment plasticity in which the early cortical effects of learning a tone-based second language involve both expansion of preexisting language-related areas and recruitment of additional cortical regions specialized for functions similar to the new language functions. &

The present paper explores the representation of inflectional morphology in the English lexicon. There has been a long-standing debate about how these inflectional relationships might be involved during on-line processing. Inflected forms may be derived from an uninflected base form by rule application; by contrast, both regular and irregular inflection may be treated in the same way, with morphological patterns emerging from mappings between base and inflected forms. The present series of experiments investigated these issues using a lexical decision task. The first experiment showed that response latencies to nouns were significantly shorter than those to verbs. A possible explanation for these results can be found in differences in inflectional structure between English nouns and verbs. Namely, the relative frequency of uninflected compared with inflected forms is greater for nouns than for verbs. Two additional experiments compared noun stimuli with different inflectional structures. In all cases, differences in response latencies were predicted by the frequency of the surface form, whether uninflected or inflected. The pattern of results lends support for a unitary associative system for processing regular inflection of nouns in English and argues against the view that regular inflected plurals are derived by rule from a single, uninflected lexical entry.The role of morphological structure in the mental lexicon has been much debated, with respect to both the composition of lexical entries and the process by which sensory information is matched to these internal representations (for reviews, see Butterworth, 1983;Feldman, 1995;Henderson, 1985;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994; McQueen & Cutler, in press;Sandra, 1994;Taft, 1991). The basic question addressed is how morphological relations among words are relevant in the perception and production oflanguage.Although numerous studies have examined morphological issues, the results are far from conclusive. In general, two basic positions have emerged. At one extreme, arguments have been presented that support a full listing ofall morphologically complex forms in the lexicon (Butterworth, 1983;Manelis & Tharp, 1977). In such models, lexical access occurs via morphologically complex lexical entries. At the other extreme, there are claims that the input lexicon is morphologically organized. In these models, access occurs via uninflected base forms after affixes are stripped away (Taft, 1985;Taft & Forster, 1975), Many recent models incorporate features from both of these positions, allowing both holistic and decomposed morphological representation and processing (Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988;Frauenfelder & Schreuder, We would like to thank Cisca Custers and Toine Thissen for assistance in stimulus preparation and Scott Gargash and John Mertus for technical help. The comments on an earlier draft by Steve Pinker, Kathryn Spoehr, and an anonymous reviewer were helpful. We would also like to thank the Brown University Phonetics Laboratory for use of ...