Sociophonetics–the interface of sociolinguistics and phonetics–is a field that has expanded
rapidly in recent years. A subject that requires both methodological and theoretical …

In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the
standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief …

Classic non-native speech perception findings suggested that adults have difficulty
discriminating segmental distinctions that are not employed contrastively in their own …

What is it that makes us human? This is one of the most challenging and important questions
we face. Our species' defining characteristic is language-we appear to be unique in the …

Studies of the categorical perception (CP) of sensory continua have a long and rich history
in psychophysics. In 1977, Macmillan, Kaplan, and Creelman introduced the use of signal …

Research on language-specific tuning in speech perception has focused mainly on
consonants, while that on non-native vowel perception has failed to address whether the …

A variety of studies have demonstrated that organizing stimuli into categories can affect the
way the stimuli are perceived. We explore the influence of categories on perception through …

The focus of this chapter is on how infants perceive, process, and learn from their auditory
environments. We focus on mechanism of hearing, speech perception, and early language …

Categorical effects are found across speech sound categories, with the degree of these
effects ranging from extremely strong categorical perception in consonants to nearly …

Previous research has shown that the perception of speech sounds is strongly influenced by
the internal structure of maternal language categories. Specifically, it has been shown that …