The status of the syllable in the perception of spanish and englisb

Bradley, Dianne; Sánchez‐Casas, Rosa; Garcı́a-Albea, José E.

doi:10.1080/01690969308406954

Cited by 85 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The above conclusions have been substantiated by research conducted in other languages with a wide variety of experimental procedures (Bradley, Sanchez-Casas, & Garcia-Albea, 1993;Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1986Otake, Hatano, Cutler, & Mehler, 1993;Pallier, Sebastian-Galles, Felguera, Christophe, & Mehler, 1993;Sebastian-Galles, Dupoux, Segui, & Mehler, 1992;Zwitserlood, Schriefers, Lahiri, & Donselaar, 1993). From these studies, it emerges that the nature ofaccent, the number of vowels, the extent to which the language relies on vowel reduction, and so forth are all factors that influence how the acoustic signal is exploited in order to identify lexical candidates.…”

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confidence: 83%

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

et al. 1998

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Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10-15 sentences, as if their perceptual system was "adapting" to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that, for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, exposure to compressed sentences in either language improves performance on sentences in the other language. Experiment 2 reports that Catalan/Spanish transfer of performance occurs even in monolingual speakers of Spanish who do not understand Catalan. In Experiment 3, we study another pair of languagesnamely, English and French-and report no transfer of adaptation between these two languages for English-French bilinguals. Experiment 4, with monolingual English speakers, assesses transfer of adaptation from French, Dutch, and English toward English. Here we find that there is no adaptation from French and intermediate adaptation from Dutch. We discuss the locus of the adaptation to compressed speech and relate our findings to other cross-linguistic studies in speech perception.

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confidence: 83%

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

et al. 1998

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“…Similarily, languages are characterized by higher order units (such as syllables, or morae) which allow the specification of restrictions on the co-occurrence of individual segments. Evidence for cross-linguistic variation in the way these structures are used in perception have been found (Bradley et al, 1993;Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1983;Cutler & Norris, 1988;Otake, Hatano, Cutler, & Mehler, 1993;Pallier et al, 1993;Sebastian-Galles et al, 1992;Zwitserlood, Schriefers, Lahiri, & Donselaar, 1993).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spanish is also a syllable-timed language, but it also involves an alternating pattern of prominence peaks that reflects a higher order prosodic unit: the foot. Nonetheless, previous psycholinguistic investigations found that the two languages processed syllabic structures in very similar ways (Bradley, Sánchez-Casas, & García-Albea, 1993;Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981;Pallier, Sebastian-Gallés, Felguera, Christophe, & Mehler, 1993;Sebastian-Galles, Dupoux, Segui, & Mehler, 1992). Second, French has 14 vowels, and Spanish only five.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Destressing “Deafness” in French?

Dupoux

Pallier

Sebastian

et al. 1997

Journal of Memory and Language

365

374

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Spanish but not French uses accent to contrast between words (e.g., tópo vs topó). Two populations of subjects were tested on the same materials to determine whether this difference has an impact on the perceptual capacities of listeners. In Experiment 1, using an ABX paradigm, we found that French subjects had significantly more difficulties than Spanish subjects to perform an ABX classification task based on accent. In Experiment 2, we found that Spanish subjects were unable to ignore irrelevant differences in accent in a phoneme-based ABX task, whereas French subjects had no difficulty at all. In Experiment 3, we replicated the basic French finding, and found that Spanish subjects benefited from redundant accent information even when phonemic information alone was sufficient to perform the task. In our final experiment, we showed that French subjects can be made to respond to the acoustic correlates of accent; therefore their difficulty in Experiment 1 seem to be located at the level of short-term memory. The implications of these findings for language-specific processing and acquisition are discussed.The native speaker's difficulties with some nonnative segmental contrasts is well documented, (e.g., Polka & Werker, 1994). Much less is known about the way in which rhythmical and structural properties of the native language affect encoding of foreign words. This study reports four experiments to assess the claim that nonsegmental properties of the native language greatly affect the way in which unfamiliar items are processed and represented.Learning a language requires, inter alia, acquiring knowledge of the language's sound pattern. Psycholinguists have mostly assumed that learning the sound pattern of a native language essentially involves learning the segments of the language. This assumption is evident in books and articles on the subject, e.g., Carroll (1960) for an early formulation of this view and Miller and Jusczyk (1990) for a later one. There is no question that segments are an essential ingredient of the sound pattern of language though many other properties of speech are also important. Foreign accents reflect segmental difficulties but also supra-segmental ones. For instance, informal observations suggest that French speakers who acThis research was supported by grants from the Human Frontier Science Program, the Human Capital program, the FrancoSpanish Exchange Program for 1993-1995, the Fyssen Foundation and DRET. We thank Jennifer Glos, Xavier Hardy and Olivier Crouzet for help in stimulus construction and data gathering. We thank Stanislas Dehaene and Brit van Ooijen for very useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Mailing address: Emmanuel Dupoux, 54 Bd Raspail, F-75270 Paris Cedex 06, France. http://www.ehess.fr/centres/lscp/persons/dupoux quire English after puberty produce segments that are not prototypical of English, and prosodic output is usually deficient as well. It is not uncommon to hear speakers of French who fail to reduce vowels or who make the wrong vowel prominent. ...

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“…A direct analogue of Mehler and co-workers' (1981) study failed to nd a syllable effect in English (Cutler et al, 1986), and this failure has been replicated many times (Bradley et al, 1993;Cutler, Norris, & Williams, 1987;Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1992;Kearns, 1994;Taft & Hambly, 1985). Even with input in a language in which the syllable effect is robust-that is, in which syllable boundaries are putatively clear-English listeners show such effects neither in the syllable detection task itself (Cutler et al, 1986) nor in word stem completion (Peretz et al, 1996).…”

Section: Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Syllable's Role in the Segmentation of Stress Languages

Cutler

1997

Language and Cognitive Processes

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THE "SYLLABLE EFFECT"If French listeners are asked to detect, as rapidly as possible, the phonologica l fragment ba-in a series of spoken words, they respond faster to the word balance than to balcon; conversely, the target bal-is detected more rapidly in balcon than in balance. Syllable boundaries in French are clear: The rst syllable of balance is ba-and the rst syllable of balcon is bal-. Thus listeners consistently respond faster to targets which correspond precisely to the initial syllable of a word. This "syllable effect" discovered by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Segui (1981) has prompted (so far!) a decade and a half of follow-up work (Frauenfelder & Kearns, 1996) .The nding is important because it suggests a mechanism by which listeners can attack the problem of continuity of spoken utterances: Clear cues to where words begin and end are rare, but listeners can only understand utterances by decomposing (i.e. segmenting) them into the individual words of which they are made up. Restricting the possible points at which words might conceivably begin to the set of detected syllable boundaries would simplify this segmentation problem.Syllable effects are extremely robust in experiments with French listeners.

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The status of the syllable in the perception of spanish and englisb

Cited by 85 publications

References 26 publications

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

A Destressing “Deafness” in French?

The Syllable's Role in the Segmentation of Stress Languages

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