The present paper reports on the findings and conclusions of an experimental study that investigated the perception of Scottish English /i/-/I / by Spanish speakers. The conclusions suggest that 1) L2 speakers can learn to identify and discriminate a new contrast, 2) these speakers may also learn to signal a new contrast using an acoustic cue that is secondary for the L1 perception of the same contrast, this could be evidence for “category formation ” on the basis of non-native cue weighting, and 3) the L2 results showed to pattern in a way that may suggest stage-like development in the acquisition of new contrasts. Further/current research to find more evidence for these and other related ideas is presented towards the end of this paper.

The influence of a native language on learning new speech sounds in adulthood is addressed using a network model in which speech categories are attractors implemented through interactive activation and Hebbian learning. The network has a representation layer that receives topographic projections from an input layer and has reciprocal excitatory connections with deeper layers. When applied to an experiment in which Japanese adults were trained to distinguish the English /r/–/l / contrast (McCandliss, Fiez, Protopapas, Conway, & McClelland, 2002), the model can account for many aspects of the experimental results, such as the time course and outcome of the learning, how it varies as a function of feedback, the relative efficacy of adaptive and initially easy training stimuli versus nonadaptive and difficult stimuli, and the development of a discrimination peak at the acquired category boundary. The model is also able to capture some aspects of the individual differences in learning.

Recently, speech researchers have begun to examine the formation of speech sound (phonetic) categories and to analyze the internal structure of the consequent categories. One of the most prominent products of this subfield has been the Perceptual Magnet Effect (PME) and the attendant Native Language Magnet (NLM) theory of Kuhl (1991, 2000). In the present paper, a critical review of the evidence for NLM is offered. Because of concerns about the nature of the stimuli, possible confounds inherent in the empirical procedures and failed replications, it is concluded that there is little positive evidence supporting NLM. However, the goal of uncovering the structures of phonetic categories and mechanisms responsible for those structures remains central to an understanding of language acquisition and speech perception more generally. Data from several empirical paradigms investigating the formation and structure of complex auditory categories are beginning to form a coherent picture of phonetic category acquisition.

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linguistica. Il caso della prosodia 69 Valentina Caniparoli, The role of rhythmic and distributional cues in speech recognition 85 Olga M. Manfrellotti, The role of literacy in the recognition of phonological units 99 Sarah Hawkins & Rachel Smith, Polysp: a polysystemic, phonetically-rich approach to speech understandingDirettore/Editor: Pier Marco Bertinetto (Pisa, SNS).

We present a method for assessing categorical perception from continuous discrimination data. Until recently, categorical perception of speech has exclusively been measured by discrimination and identification experiments with a small number of repeatedly presented stimuli. Experiments by Rogers and Davis [1] have shown that using non-repeating stimuli along a densely-sampled phonetic continuum yields a more reliable measure of categorization. However, no analysis method has been proposed that would preserve the continuous nature of the obtained discrimination data. In the present study, we describe a method of analysis that can be applied to continuous discrimination data without having to discretize the raw data at any time during the analysis. Index Terms: categorical perception, continuous stimuli, discrimination

Speech perception (SP) most commonly refers to the perceptual mapping from the highly variable acoustic speech signal to a linguistic representation, whether it be phonemes, diphones, syllables, or words. This is an example of categorization, in that potentially discriminable speech sounds are assigned to functionally equivalent classes. In this tutorial, we present some of the main challenges to our understanding of the categorization of speech sounds and the conceptualization of SP that has resulted from these challenges. We focus here on issues and experiments that define open research questions relevant to phoneme categorization, arguing that SP is best understood as perceptual categorization, a position that places SP in direct contact with research from other areas of perception and cognition.

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Weighting of vowel cues explains patterns of word–object

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