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

Over the course of the first year of life, infants develop from being generalized listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts, into specialized listeners whose discrimination patterns closely reflect the phonetic system of the native language(s). Recent work by Maye, Werker and Gerken (2002) has proposed a statistical account for this phenomenon, showing that infants may lose the ability to discriminate some foreign language contrasts on the basis of their sensitivity to the statistical distribution of sounds in the input language. In this paper we examine the process of enhancement in infant speech perception, whereby initially difficult phonetic contrasts become better discriminated when they define two categories that serve a functional role in the native language. In particular, we demonstrate that exposure to a bimodal statistical distribution in 8-month-old infants ’ phonetic input can lead to increased discrimination of difficult contrasts. In addition, this exposure also facilitates discrimination of an unfamiliar contrast sharing the same phonetic feature as the contrast presented during familiarization, suggesting that infants extract acoustic/phonetic information that is invariant across an abstract featural representation.

3. Speech and meters 4. Further problems with the alphabetic model of language 5. Two levels of complex system 6. Language as a social institution

VOT productions of word-initial stops in Mandarin and English: A cross-language study

This study examines the influence of lexical tone upon voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin and Hakka. Examination of VOT values for Mandarin and Hakka word-initial stops /p, t, k, p h, t h, k h / followed by three vowels /i, u, a / in different lexical tones revealed that lexical tone has a significant influence on the VOTs. The result is important because it suggests that future studies should take its influence into account when studying VOT values for stops in tonal languages. In Mandarin, stops’

This study examined whether native speakers of Japanese could attend to critical acoustic features while identifying lenis and aspirated among Korean alveolar stops. Most Japanese participants had studied Korean for more than one year at a university language center in Korea. Native speakers of Korean were also tested with the same task for comparison. Korean participants discriminated the phonemic contrast according to both VOT and F0 or just F0. In contrast, Japanese participants identified lenis and aspirated mostly based on VOT information. They correctly identified stimuli of the phonemes which a speaker produced distinctively in terms of VOT. When stimuli weren’t noticeably different in VOT, they confused the two phonemes. Unlike Korean participants, they hardly considered F0 information. This result suggests that some training materials, although they were produced by native speakers, can’t lead L2 learners to catch critical acoustic information of L2 phonemes. If learners can identify L2 sounds accurately without attention to critical features, they may stick to wrong information in the sounds. Index Terms: L2 phonemic identification, phonemic training, acoustic feature, attention, Korean

We present a progress report on a large-scale corpus study of the trajectories of different phonetic parameters over the course of three months in a diverse group of speakers situated in a linguistically and socially closed system. The data analyzed so far, and presented in this paper, consist of 806 Voice Onset Time (VOT) measurements

This study investigates the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonant production in six bilingual English-Arabic children in order to examine whether bilingual children possess one unitary or two separate linguistic systems. A total of six English-Arabic bilingual children participated ages 5 to 10. English and Arabic stop consonants followed by a vowel /a / made by bilingual children were measured in terms of Voice-Onset-Time. This study found that bilingual children have distinctive voiced and voiceless stop consonants in English. However, there were some influences from Arabic stop systems. The results of this study supported the theory of two separate linguistic systems. Our research findings suggested that children did acquire separate VOT patterns. The aim of this study was to find out whether bilingual children produced the appropriate pattern of VOT known for each language. Results showed that overall participating children produced the voicing lead and short lag found in Arabic stops. In English the children produced the short lag / long lag differentiation apparent in stop consonants. This study provides a preliminary result. Thus, it is difficult to claim the underlying phonetic systems for bilingual children with such preliminary data. Further studies are needed to verify the findings of this study.