Before the end of the first year of life, infants begin to lose the ability to perceive distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in their native language. It is typically assumed that this developmental change reflects the construction of language-specific phoneme categories, but how these categories are learned largely remains a mystery. Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, and Dupoux (2006) present an algorithm that can discover phonemes using the distributions of allophones as well as the phonetic properties of the (...) allophones and their contexts. We show that a third type of information source, the occurrence of pairs of minimally differing word forms in speech heard by the infant, is also useful for learning phonemic categories and is in fact more reliable than purely distributional information in data containing a large number of allophones. In our model, learners build an approximation of the lexicon consisting of the high-frequency n-grams present in their speech input, allowing them to take advantage of top-down lexical information without needing to learn words. This may explain how infants have already begun to exhibit sensitivity to phonemic categories before they have a large receptive lexicon. (shrink)

The Merge model suggests that lexical effects in phonemic processing reflect the activation of post-lexical phonemic representations that are distinct from prelexical phonemic input representations. This distinction seems to be unmotivated; the phoneme fails to capture the richness of prelexical representation. Increasing the information content of input representations minimizes the potential necessity for top-down processes. Footnotes1 The author is also affiliated with the Department of Psychology, Salem State College.

I agree with Norris et al. that feedback to a phonemic level is never necessary, but disagree strongly with their reason why this is true. I believe the available evidence indicates that there is no feedback because there is no phonemic level employed in the perceptual processing of speech.

In three experiments, we examined priming effects where primes were formed by transposing the first and last phoneme of tri‐phonemic target words (e.g., /byt/ as a prime for /tyb/). Auditory lexical decisions were found not to be sensitive to this transposed‐phoneme priming manipulation in long‐term priming (Experiment 1), with primes and targets presented in two separated blocks of stimuli and with unrelated primes used as control condition (/mul/‐/tyb/), while a long‐term repetition priming effect was observed (/tyb/‐/tyb/). However, a clear transposed‐phoneme (...) priming effect was found in two short‐term priming experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), with primes and targets presented in close temporal succession. The transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when unrelated prime‐target pairs (/mul/‐/tyb/) were used as control and more important when prime‐target pairs sharing the medial vowel (/pys/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, thus indicating that the effect is not due to vocalic overlap. Finally, in Experiment 3, a transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when primes sharing the medial vowel plus one consonant in an incorrect position with the targets (/byl/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, and this condition did not differ significantly from the vowel‐only condition. Altogether, these results provide further evidence for a role for position‐independent phonemes in spoken word recognition, such that a phoneme at a given position in a word also provides evidence for the presence of words that contain that phoneme at a different position. (shrink)

Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech correspondence using (...) English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences. (shrink)

The prime objective of this paper is to conduct phoneme categorization experiments for Indian languages. In this direction a major effort has been made to categorize Hindi phonemes using a time delay neural network (TDNN), and compare the recognition scores with other languages. A total of six neural nets aimed at the major coarse of phonetic classes in Hindi were trained. Evaluation of each net on 350 training tokens and 40 test tokens revealed a 99% recognition rate for vowel (...) classes, 87% for unvoiced stops, 82% for voiced stops, 94.7% for semi vowels, 98.1% for nasals and 96.4% for fricatives. A new feature vector normalisation technique has been proposed to improve the recognition scores. (shrink)

In presenting her attractive theory of concepts, Millikan makes an unwarranted assumption about the role of language in concept acquisition. The phoneme string, rather than the “word” as a semantic entity, may suffice to play the crucial role in the acquisition of substance concepts. Hence Millikan may underestimate the degree of similarity between language and other media of perception.

Casey O’Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define ‘hearing’ – phonemes either don’t explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped it. A storied distribution in linguistics has been Zipf's law, a kind of power law. In the wake of a major debate in the sciences around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, here we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme (...) frequencies. We infer the fit of power laws and three alternative distributions to 166 Australian languages, using a maximum likelihood framework. We find evidence supporting earlier results, but also nuancing them and increasing our understanding of them. Most notably, phonemic inventories appear to have a Zipfian-like frequency structure among their most-frequent members (though perhaps also a lognormal structure) but a geometric (or exponential) structure among the least-frequent. We compare these new insights the kinds of causal processes that affect the evolution of phonemic inventories over time, and identify a potential account for why, despite there being an important role for phonetic substance in phonemic change, we could still expect inventories with highly diverse phonetic content to share similar distributions of phoneme frequencies. We conclude with priorities for future work in this promising program of research. (shrink)

Vowel phonemes are a part of any acoustic speech signal. Vowel sounds occur in speech more frequently and with higher energy. Therefore, vowel phoneme can be used to extract different amounts of speaker discriminative information in situations where acoustic information is noise corrupted. This article presents an approach to identify a speaker using the vowel sound segmented out from words spoken by the speaker. The work uses a combined self-organizing map - and probabilistic neural network -based approach to segment (...) the vowel phoneme. The segmented vowel is later used to identify the speaker of the word by matching the patterns with a learning vector quantization -based code book. The LVQ code book is prepared by taking features of clean vowel phonemes uttered by the male and female speakers to be identified. The proposed work formulates a framework for the design of a speaker-recognition model of the Assamese language, which is spoken by ∼3 million people in the Northeast Indian state of Assam. The experimental results show that the segmentation success rates obtained using a SOM-based technique provides an increase of at least 7% compared with the discrete wavelet transform-based technique. This increase contributes to the improvement in overall performance of speaker identification by ∼3% compared with earlier related works. (shrink)

Most language learners have difficulties acquiring the phonemes of a second language (L2). Unfortunately, they are often judged on their L2 pronunciation, and segmental inaccuracies contribute to miscommunication. Therefore, we aim to determine how to facilitate phoneme acquisition. Given the close relationship between speech and co-speech gesture, previous work unsurprisingly reports that gestures can benefit language acquisition, e.g., in (L2) word learning. However, gesture studies on L2 phoneme acquisition present contradictory results, implying that both specific properties of gestures and (...) phonemes used in training, and their combination, may be relevant. We investigated the effect of phoneme and gesture complexity on L2 phoneme acquisition. In a production study, Dutch natives received instruction on the pronunciation of two Spanish phonemes, /u/ and /θ/. Both are typically difficult to produce for Dutch natives because their orthographic representation differs between both languages. Moreover, /θ/ is considered more complex than /u/, since the Dutch phoneme inventory contains /u/ but not /θ/. The instruction participants received contained Spanish examples presented either via audio-only, audio-visually without gesture, audio-visually with a simple, pointing gesture, or audio-visually with a more complex, iconic gesture representing the relevant speech articulator(s). Preceding and following training, participants read aloud Spanish sentences containing the target phonemes. In a perception study, Spanish natives rated the target words from the production study on accentedness and comprehensibility. Our results show that combining gesture and speech in L2 phoneme training can lead to significant improvement in L2 phoneme production, but both gesture and phoneme complexity affect successful learning: Significant learning only occurred for the less complex phoneme /u/ after seeing the more complex iconic gesture, whereas for the more complex phoneme /θ/, seeing the more complex gesture actually hindered acquisition. The perception results confirm the production findings and show that items containing /θ/ produced after receiving training with a less complex pointing gesture are considered less foreign-accented and more easily comprehensible as compared to the same items after audio-only training. This shows that gesture can facilitate task performance in L2 phonology acquisition, yet complexity affects whether certain gestures work better for certain phonemes than others. (shrink)

In Écrits, Lacan proposes an "unthinkable list" of objects (a) that includes "the phoneme, the gaze, the voice – the nothing". While the gaze and the voice have received extensive critical commentary, the phoneme and the nothing have gone practically unnoticed. I propose to theoretically construct the object (a) by means of an explication of Lacan’s enigmatic allusion to the phoneme and the nothing. I contend that the phoneme is the "ur-form" of the object (a), whose ontological status is nothing. (...) As the ur-form of the object (a) (both structurally and genetically), the phoneme exemplifies the primary function of the structural causality of the Lacanian Real within the Symbolic Order, namely, the function of the bar resisting signification between signifier and signified. By developing the concept of the object (a) in relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis can reply to the persistent misunderstanding of Lacan’s position by deconstructive critics, such as Judith Butler. (shrink)

Previous studies suggest a relationship between second-language learning and voice recognition processes, but the nature of such relation remains poorly understood. The present study investigates whether phoneme learning relates to voice recognition. A group of bilinguals that varied in their discrimination of a second-language phoneme contrast participated in this study. We assessed participants’ voice recognition skills in their native language at the behavioral and brain electrophysiological levels during a voice-avatar learning paradigm. Second-language phoneme discrimination positively correlated with behavioral and brain (...) measures of voice recognition. At the electrophysiological level, correlations were present at two time windows and are interpreted within the dual-process model of recognition memory. The results are relevant to understanding the processes involved in language learning as they show a common variability for second-language phoneme and voice recognition processes. (shrink)

Resumen: En la actualidad existe amplia evidencia acerca de la variación alofónica del fonema /tʃ/ en el español de Chile asociada a factores socioculturales; sin embargo, estas investigaciones se han focalizado en la población adulta. Considerando lo anterior, la presente investigación tuvo por objetivo analizar la articulación del fonema /tʃ/ en una muestra de 161 niños/as desde los 2,0 a los 3,11 años de edad residentes de la ciudad de Temuco. La muestra fue dividida según edad y NSE. Entre los (...) principales resultados se observó variabilidad entre los grupos analizados según el cruce de las variables edad y NSE. En cuanto a la variación alofónica del fonema /tʃ/ según el NSE, también se evidenció un comportamiento variable entre los grupos analizados. Los resultados de esta investigación concuerdan con las discusiones actuales respecto de la relación entre los procesos evolutivos propios de la adquisición y la emergencia de variaciones de tipo social.: Currently there is a vast evidence on the allophonic variation of the phoneme /tʃ/ in Chilean Spanish, associated to social factors. Nevertheless, these researches focused on adult population. With this consideration, this study aims to analyze the articulation of the /tʃ/ phoneme in a sample of 161 kids, from 2.0 to 3.11 years old who live the city of Temuco. The sample was divided per age and socioeconomic status. Among the main results, a variably between the groups has been observed, crossing the variables age and socioeconomic status. Concerning the allophonic variable of the /tʃ/ phoneme according to the socioeconomic status, there has also been evidenced a variable behavior between the groups. The results of this study are in concordance with the current discussions on the relationship between evolutionary acquisition processes and the emergence of social variations. (shrink)

As a proponent of phoneme-like units in speech perception, I am very sympathetic to Merge's use of phoneme-oriented input. However, in the absence of any known way to provide input in exactly the form assumed, further consideration needs to be given to how the variation in the details of the specification of this input might affect Merge's (and Shortlist's) overall behavior.