Using stimuli that could be labeled either as stops [b,d] or as fricatives [f,v.B.WI, we found that, for a given acoustic stimulus, perceived place of articulation was dependent on perceived manner. This effect appeared for modified natural syllables with a free-identification task and for a synthetic transition continuum with a forced-choice identification task. Since perceived place could be changed by changing manner labels with no change in the acoustic stimulus, it follows that the processing of the place feature depends on the value the listener assigns to the manner feature rather than directly on any of the acoustic cues to manner. We interpret these results as evidence that the identification of place of articulation involves phonetic processing and could not be purely auditory.It is clear that a model for speech perception will include general-purpose auditory mechanisms at the input end of the system and speech-specific phonetic or phonological mechanisms at the output end where segments are identified. The interesting theoretical question is, how far in the process can we go using mechanisms that are also used in nonspeech processing? If we assume, for example, that the listener proceeds by identifying such features as place or manner and then combining these features into segments, it is clear that the combination operation must include mechanisms that are specialized for speech processing ("phonetic mechanisms"). In principle, however, the mechanisms involved in processing the cues to the features might be purely auditory; and, in fact, whether phonetic mechanisms are needed to process the feature cues remains a matter of controversy. See, for example, Liberman and Studdert-Kennedy (1978) and Stevens and Blumstein (1978) for some references to the extensive literature on these questions.
We investigated two-month-old infants' perception of a subset of highly confusable English fricatives. In Experiment 1, infants discriminated modified natural tokens of the voiceless fricative pair [fal/[ eal, but only when the syllables included their frication noises. They also discriminated the voiced pair [val/[dal both with and without fricative noises. These results parallel those found with adults by Carden, Levitt, Jusczyk, and Walley (1981). In Experiment 2, [fl and [el noises were appended to Tal and the same [fl noise was appended to the previously indiseriminable fricationless versions of [fal and [$al. Infants discriminated both pairs of stimuli, indicating 1) that the frication is a sufficient cue for [fal/[ eal discrimination and 2) that it provides a context for discriminating the [fl and [e1 formant transitions. We conclude that infants' perception of labio-dental/interdental fricative contrasts shows evidence of context effects similar to those observed with adults.
Bickerton and others have proposed models of creolization in which a creole with a bioprogram-unmarked grammar appears with the first gener ation of native speakers. When we construct the history of reflexives and anti-reflexives in Haitian Creole, we find instead a gradual development over more than 200 years, starting from a typologically unusual system that seems an unlikely candidate for the unmarked setting of the bioprogram, and passing through one or two intermediate stages to the typologically unmarked present-day system. A comparison with the limited available data on first and second language acquisition suggests that a model of creolization based on functional considerations and inheritance from a pre ceding pidgin will account for this history at least as well as a model based on first language acquisition. The history of Haitian Creole Binding Theory thus shows a classical "deep creole" acting much like Sankoffs analysis of Tok Pisin, and quite unlike the predictions of Bickerton's model or any model that predicts that a stable creole will develop in a single generation. This Haitian Creole data therefore implies a gradualist model of creolization, in which "creolization" is seen as a process extend ing over a number of generations of native speakers.
Most of the time a pronoun follows its antecedent, as in (Ia); less often the pronoun comes first, as in (Ib):(1) (a) The woman who is to marry Ralph will visit him tomorrow. (Forwards Pronominalization; coreferent elements in italics)(b) The woman who is to marry him will visit Ralph tomorrow. (Backwards Pronominalization)In elementary syntax classes we account for these ‘Backwards Pronominalization’ cases by building something like the Langacker (1969)/Ross (1969) structural condition into our Pronominalization rule.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.