This study constitutes a large-scale comparative analysis of acoustic cues for classification of place of articulation in fricatives. To date, no single metric has been found to classify fricative place of articulation with a high degree of accuracy. This study presents spectral, amplitudinal, and temporal measurements that involve both static properties ͑spectral peak location, spectral moments, noise duration, normalized amplitude, and F2 onset frequency͒ and dynamic properties ͑relative amplitude and locus equations͒. While all cues ͑except locus equations͒ consistently serve to distinguish sibilant from nonsibilant fricatives, the present results indicate that spectral peak location, spectral moments, and both normalized and relative amplitude serve to distinguish all four places of fricative articulation. These findings suggest that these static and dynamic acoustic properties can provide robust and unique information about all four places of articulation, despite variation in speaker, vowel context, and voicing.

The ability of native English (NE) and native Chinese (NC) speakers to identify and discriminate the mid‐ versus the low‐tone contrast in Thai was investigated before and after auditory training. The variables under investigation were first language background and the interstimulus interval (ISI) of the presentation (500 ms vs. 1500 ms). The NC group outperformed the NE group in its ability to discriminate the two Thai tones under the ISI 500 ms condition before training and under both ISI conditions after training. A significant improvement in identification from the pretest to the posttest was observed in the NC group under both ISI conditions, but not in the NE group. These results suggest that prior experience with the tone system in one tone language may be transferable to the perception of tone in another language.

Background: Tone languages such as Thai and Mandarin Chinese use differences in fundamental frequency (F 0 , pitch) to distinguish lexical meaning. Previous behavioral studies have shown that native speakers of a non-tone language have difficulty discriminating among tone contrasts and are sensitive to different F 0 dimensions than speakers of a tone language. The aim of the present ERP study was to investigate the effect of language background and training on the non-attentive processing of lexical tones. EEG was recorded from 12 adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, 12 native speakers of American English, and 11 Thai speakers while they were watching a movie and were presented with multiple tokens of low-falling, mid-level and high-rising Thai lexical tones. High-rising or low-falling tokens were presented as deviants among mid-level standard tokens, and vice versa. EEG data and data from a behavioral discrimination task were collected before and after a two-day perceptual categorization training task.

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Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally, they indicated words they considered to be phonologically similar to the nonwords. Analyses of variance on the production and perception data indicated that both syllabic structure and lexical class (noun or verb) had an effect on main stress assignment. In logistic regression analyses on the production and perception responses. predictions of stress placement made by (1) syllable structure, (2) lexical class, and (3) stress patterns of phonologically similar words all contributed significantly and uniquely to the prediction of main stress assignment. The results indicate that phonological theories of English word stress need to allow for multiple, competing, probabilistic factors in accounts of main stress placement including syllabic structure (most notably vowel length), lexical class, and stress patterns of phonologically similar words.