Patterns of Sounds

Maddieson, Ian; Zonneveld, Wim

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30663-1

Cited by 151 publications

(218 citation statements)

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“…The target language we selected for this purpose was Nuu-Chah-Nulth, which has a set of voiceless fricatives that meet our criteria (Maddieson, 1984). Nuu-Chah-Nulth is a Wakashan language spoken on Vancouver Island, Canada, which has velar /x/ and uvular /x/ fricatives, both produced with the tongue body but at different constriction locations, and a pharyngeal /£/ fricative, produced with the tongue root (Carlson, Esling, & Fraser, 2001).…”

Section: Experiments 1: Discrimination Of Non-native Voiceless Fricatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the role of articulatory organs and perceptual assimilation in infants' discrimination of native and non‐native fricative place contrasts

Tyler

Best

Goldstein

et al. 2014

Developmental Psychobiology

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The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171-204). Baltimore, MD: York Press.) accounts for developmental patterns of speech contrast discrimination by proposing that infants shift from untuned phonetic perception at 6 months to natively tuned perceptual assimilation at 11-12 months, but the model does not predict initial discrimination differences among contrasts. To address that issue, we evaluated the Articulatory Organ Hypothesis, which posits that consonants produced using different articulatory organs are initially easier to discriminate than those produced with the same articulatory organ. We tested English-learning 6- and 11-month-olds' discrimination of voiceless fricative place contrasts from Nuu-Chah-Nulth (non-native) and English (native), with one within-organ and one between-organ contrast from each language. Both native and non-native contrasts were discriminated across age, suggesting that articulatory-organ differences do not influence perception of speech contrasts by young infants. The results highlight the fact that a decline in discrimination for non-native contrasts does not always occur over age.

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Section: Experiments 1: Discrimination Of Non-native Voiceless Fricatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the role of articulatory organs and perceptual assimilation in infants' discrimination of native and non‐native fricative place contrasts

Tyler

Best

Goldstein

et al. 2014

Developmental Psychobiology

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“…Moreover, as discussed in the Introduction, contrasts based on less salient differences tend, very broadly speaking, to be among the less common contrasts in phonological systems (e.g. Maddieson, 1984;Lindblom, 1986). The typological asymmetry of nasal place contrasts, with alveolar and bilabial nasals being found more often than velar nasals in the world's languages, especially in syllable-onset position, combined with results showing that adult discrimination of [ma]-[na] is significantly better than discrimination of [na]-[¢a] even in cases where both contrasts are native (Narayan, 2008), led us to hypothesize in the present study that discrimination of [na]-[¢a] would be difficult for young infants regardless of their language experience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While an overwhelming majority (99%) of the world's languages have oral consonants produced with bilabial ( ⁄ p ⁄ ), alveo-dental ( ⁄ t ⁄ ), and velar ( ⁄ k ⁄ ) constrictions, only about half of the world's languages have corresponding nasal consonants at all three places of articulation, with languages having bilabial ⁄ m ⁄ and alveo-dental ⁄ n ⁄ more often than velar ⁄ ¢ ⁄ (i.e. 'ng' as in 'sing') (Maddieson, 1984). The distribution of these sounds within syllables shows an even greater asymmetry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The interaction between acoustic salience and language experience in developmental speech perception: evidence from nasal place discrimination

Narayan

Werker

Beddor

2010

Developmental Science

163

207

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Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10-12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to the influence of native language experience, acoustic salience also affects the perceptual reorganization that takes place in infancy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, two nasal place distinctions that differ in relative acoustic salience, acoustically robust labial-alveolar [ma]-[na] and acoustically less salient alveolar-velar [na]-[ enga], were presented to infants in a cross-language design. English-learning infants at 6-8 and 10-12 months showed discrimination of the native and acoustically robust [ma]-[na] (Experiment 1), but not the non-native (in initial position) and acoustically less salient [na]-[ enga] (Experiment 2). Very young (4-5-month-old) English-learning infants tested on the same native and non-native contrasts also showed discrimination of only the [ma]-[na] distinction (Experiment 3). Filipino-learning infants, whose ambient language includes the syllable-initial alveolar (/n/)-velar (/ eng/) contrast, showed discrimination of native [na]-[ enga] at 10-12 months, but not at 6-8 months (Experiment 4). These results support the hypothesis that acoustic salience affects speech perception in infancy, with native language experience facilitating discrimination of an acoustically similar phonetic distinction [na]-[ enga]. We discuss the implications of this developmental profile for a comprehensive theory of speech perception in infancy.

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“…The competition mechanism in HSR models helps them solve what we refer to as the lexical-embedding problem. Because natural language vocabularies are large (many languages have on the order of 100,000 words), but are constructed from a limited set of phonemes (most languages have inventories of between 10 and 50 phonemes; Maddieson, 1984), and because words have a limited word length, it is necessarily the case that there is considerable phonological overlap among words. Any given word is likely to begin in the same way as several other words (Luce, 1986) and to end in the same way as other words.…”

Section: Multiple Activation and Evaluation Of Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Should a Speech Recognizer Work?

et al. 2005

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Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input.

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Patterns of Sounds

Cited by 151 publications

References 0 publications

Investigating the role of articulatory organs and perceptual assimilation in infants' discrimination of native and non‐native fricative place contrasts

Investigating the role of articulatory organs and perceptual assimilation in infants' discrimination of native and non‐native fricative place contrasts

The interaction between acoustic salience and language experience in developmental speech perception: evidence from nasal place discrimination

How Should a Speech Recognizer Work?

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