Lexical effects in the perception and production of American English /p/ allophones

Listeners use vowel harmony and word-final stress to spot nonsense words: A study of Turkish and French

“…A similar situation was found with respect to allophonic and durational regularities that have no phonological signifi cance but can be exploited by speakers in word recognition tasks (Spinelli et al 2003;Salverda et al 2003). Arguably, such phonetic cues fail to be substantially and consistently operationalized for identifi cation or discrimination purposes in speech perception tasks (e.g., Werker and Tees 1984;Whalen et al 1997;Kazanina et al 2006), suggesting that the status of some phonetic or phonological regularity may be non-uniform across different levels of language representation and processing. Cues that may be insuffi cient for grouping items in memory (such as predictable stress in French or Turkish) can nevertheless be used in 'instant' processing tasks such as speech segmentation and word recognition to demarcate word boundaries.…”

Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants

“…At the same time, they may have different implications for how infants represent and perceive alternating segments. Whereas both accounts suggest that exposure to this type of distributional information leads infants to group alternating segments into the same functional category, only the first account suggests further that infants may perceive alternating segments as more similar (as is the case in adults' allophonic perception; Kazanina et al, 2006;Whalen et al, 1997).…”

“…[p] alternate as a function of phonological context; the phonetic difference between them is not contrastive (i.e., does not produce a semantic contrast). Importantly, adults have difficulty distinguishing among allophones of the same phoneme; they perceive alternating allophones as more similar than phones in different phonemic categories, even when acoustic distance is equated (Whalen, Best & Irwin, 1997). Moreover, language-specific effects of phonemic status have been found both behaviorally and neurally (Kazanina, Philips & Idsardi, 2006).…”

Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

“…Being segments of different phonemes is not sufficient for sounds to be discriminable (e.g., [t Ϸ ], the unaspirated /t/ that occurs after /s/, and [ ], the voiceless /d/, although from different phonemic categories in English, /t/ and /d/, are difficult to discriminate due to acoustic similarity; Pegg & Werker, 1997); nevertheless, adults generally process phonemic contrasts more efficiently than allophonic ones. For example, adults generally exhibit poorer and slower discrimination between allophones of the same phoneme than between two different phonemes (Boomershine, Hall, Hume, & Johnson, 2008;Whalen, Best, & Irwin, 1997).…”