Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by alphabetical orthographies or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed auditory code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker’s voice properties and other details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not necessarily employed as units in speakers’ memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and linguistic generalizations across a community are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.

Navigation queries are typical examples of contexts in which a recognizer may have to deal with non-native names. In order to build a pronunciation lexicon with these names, special GtoP rules may be derived. The paper addresses this problem in the context of navigation queries in French including German names and viceversa. The special GtoP rules were mostly based on statistics derived from cross-lingual spoken corpora.

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronunciation problems is needed, especially in the case of the development of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training systems. The research reported on in this paper is aimed at obtaining systematic information on segmental pronunciation errors made by learners of Dutch with different mother tongues. In particular, we aimed at identifying errors that are frequent, perceptually salient, persistent, and potentially hampering to communication. To achieve this goal we conducted analyses on different corpora of speech produced by L2 learners under different conditions. This resulted in a robust inventory of pronunciation errors that can be used for designing efficient pronunciation training programs.

In this article, I address the following broad issues: 1) how parsing procedures influence the acquisition of new phonological representations, focussing on the

In this article, I discuss a linguistic model for explaining second-language (L2) sound perception, which is a phenomenon that has commonly been modelled within the disciplines of phonetics and psycholinguistics. This linguistic model will be applied to the learning of SIMILAR L2 sounds. This L2 learning scenario refers to the acquisition of the knowledge involved in the perception of L2 sounds that are phonologically equivalent but yet phonetically different from the acoustically closest sounds in the learner’s first language (L1). In the introduction, I argue, based on phonetic and psycholinguistic grounds, that speech perception is a language-specific phenomenon that should be brought into the domain of phonological modelling. Additionally, I propose a number of characteristics which incorporate phonological, phonetic, and psycholinguistic modelling and which should be found in a comprehensive and explanatory adequate model for sound perception. In § 2, I demonstrate that the Linguistic Perception (LP) model complies with these criteria. Crucially, I show that the L1 acquisition component of the LP model is shown to constitute a successful proposal for the mechanisms involved in learning to perceive L1 sounds. In § 3, I show how

Abstract. In cross-language speech perception studies, the perceptual categories of a listener group are often assumed to be adequately represented by single, abstract labels, such as the position-dependent allophonic variant of a phoneme. However, listeners of different languages may also vary in their perceptual weighting of acoustic cues that signal a given phoneme, or its allophonic realization, in their language. These two competing units of analysis were evaluated in a cross-language perceptual similarity test employing a broad range of non-native stimuli and listener groups. In this experiment, an AXB classification test using nasal consonants from Malayalam (bilabial, interdental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar) was administered to three sets of listener groups with common coronal nasal inventories: dental-retroflex (Marathi, Punjabi), alveolar-retroflex (Tamil, Oriya), and alveolar (Bengali, American English). A two-dimensional multidimensional scaling analysis of the similarity scores revealed language-specific differences that were not predictable from the test groups ’ nasal inventories, as represented by positiondependent allophones. The dental-retroflex and alveolar groups showed intra-group differences in their clustering of stimuli and their weighting of both perceptual dimensions, leading to language-specific perceptual spaces. Only the alveolar-retroflex group spaces were similarly organized. The results demonstrate that descriptions of the native perceptual categories of listeners must be made at the level of the individual acoustic cues that are labels.

Abstract. This study examined two possible sources of individual differences in crosslanguage speech perception, the capacity to phonologically encode speech and short-term memory span. Phonological coding was defined as the ability to encode non-native contrasts as distinct phonemes based on representations in long-term memory. Short-term memory was defined as a fixed capacity regulating the extent of encoded phonetic detail. To compare these two predictors of cross-language speech perception performance, thirty native speakers of American English were administered five tests: categorial AXB discrimination and identification (using non-native nasal consonant contrasts), digit span, nonword span (using pronounceable nonwords with nasal consonants, produced by a native speaker of English), and paired-associate word learning with word-word and wordnonword conditions. The AXB discrimination results were correlated with measures of short-term memory (digit span, word-nonword learning), phonological coding (identification), and a memory span measure mediated by phonological coding (nonword span). The results showed that almost all measures were significantly correlated with one another (+0.62> r> +0.41), with the exception of word-word learning. The strongest predictor for the AXB discrimination test results was nonword span (r = +0.62, p < 0.01). When the identification test results were partialed out, only nonword span significantly correlated with discrimination (r = +0.54, p < 0.01). The results show an association between the discrimination of these non-native contrasts and a short-term memory capacity that interacts and relies heavily on prior linguistic experience in long-term memory.

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of language-specificity in the auditory perception of Chinese tones. Chinese and American English (AE) listeners participated in a series of perception experiments, which involved short ISIs (300ms in Experiment 1 and 100ms elsewhere) and an AX discrimination (limited set in Experiments 2 and 3, speeded response in Experiments BJ, RG and YT) or AX degreeof-difference rating (Experiment 4) task. All experiments used natural speech monosyllabic tone stimuli, except Experiment 2, which used sinewave simulations of Putonghua (Beijing Mandarin) tones. AE listeners showed psychoacoustic listening in all experiments, paying much attention to onset and offset pitch. Chinese listeners showed language-specific patterns in all experiments to various degrees. The most robust language-specific effects of Putonghua were found in Experiments 1, 3 and 4, where the T214 (as well as T35) neutralization rule shortened the perceptual distance between T35 and T214 (or that between T55 and T35) for Chinese listeners. Cross-dialectal as well as age differences were observed among Chinese listeners in Experiments BJ, RG and YT