Search results for "Vowel"

Infants' brain responses for speech sound changes in fast multifeature MMN paradigm.

2013

Abstract Objective We investigated whether newborn speech-sound discrimination can be studied in 40min using fast multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm and do the results differ from those obtained with the traditional oddball paradigm. Methods Newborns' MMN responses to five types of changes (consonant identity, F0, intensity, vowel duration and vowel identity) were recorded in the multifeature group ( N =15) and vowel duration and vowel identity changes in the oddball group ( N =13), after which the MMNs from both groups were compared with each others. Results Statistically significant MMNs in the 190–600ms time range from the stimulus onset were found for most change types in b…

Does conal prime CANAL more than cinal? Masked phonological priming effects in Spanish with the lexical decision task.

2005

Evidence for an early involvement of phonology in word identification usually relies on the comparison between a target word preceded by a homophonic prime and an orthographic control (rait-RATE vs. raut-RATE). This comparison rests on the assumption that the two control primes are equally orthographically similar to the target. Here, we tested for phonological effects with a masked priming paradigm in which orthographic similarity between priming conditions was perfectly controlled at the letter level and in which identification of the prime was virtually at chance for both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (66 and 50 msec). In the key prime-target pairs, each prime differed from the targ…

Attention effects on the processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant speech sounds and letters

2013

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study effects of selective attention on the processing of attended and unattended spoken syllables and letters. Participants were presented with syllables randomly occurring in the left or right ear and spoken by different voices and with a concurrent foveal stream of consonant letters written in darker or lighter fonts. During auditory phonological and non-phonological tasks, they responded to syllables in a designated ear starting with a vowel and spoken by female voices, respectively. These syllables occurred infrequently among standard syllables starting with a consonant and spoken by male voices. During visual phonological and non-phonol…

Does consonant–vowel skeletal structure play a role early in lexical processing? Evidence from masked priming

2017

Published online: 02 November 2017 Is the specific consonant–vowel (CV) letter combination of a word a basic source of information for lexical access in the early stages of processing? We designed two masked priming lexical decision experiments to respond to this question by directly examining the role of CV skeletal structure in written-word recognition. To that aim, each target word was preceded by a one-letter different nonword prime that kept the same CV skeletal structure or not. We also included an identity prime as a control. Results showed faster word identification times in the CV congruent condition than in the CV incongruent condition when a consonant was replaced from the target…

On the role of consonants and vowels in visual-word processing: Evidence with a letter search paradigm

2010

Prior research has shown that the search function in the visual letter search task may reflect the regularities of the orthographic structure of a given script. In the present experiment, we examined whether the search function of letter detection was sensitive to consonant-vowel status of a pre-cued letter. Participants had to detect the presence/absence of a previously cued letter target (either vowel or consonant) at the initial, central or final position in a five-letter Spanish word or pseudoword. Results showed a significant effect of consonant-vowel status on letter search function which paralleled the orthographic constraints of Spanish. When searching for a consonant, participants …

Hill or hell : identification of English vowels by Finnish schoolchildren knowing no English

2007

Chapter 15. Portuguese remnants in the Spanish of Olivenza (Extremadura)

2020

Notes on Some Turkic Vowel Developments

1970

This contribution deals with four types of vowel developments found in Turkic languages. Two of these, i-umlaut and u-umlaut, areregressive vowel assimilations, the other two – vowel raising and vowel lowering – originate in a reduction in terms of quantity. In order to get a rough idea of the distribution of the phenomena under discussion, modern Standard Uyghur, a language in which these developments are especially common, is taken as a starting point. Lexemes in which one or more of these changes occur are compared with the cognates in other modern and historical Turkic languages. It turns out that while most of the vowel developments considered here have gained a certain dissemination a…

Bengali nasal vowels: Lexical representation and listener perception

2022

This paper focuses on the question of the representation of nasality as well as speakers’ awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels (CṼC) and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant (CVN). A series of three cross-modal forced-choice experiments was used to investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is stored and that this sparse representation governs how listeners interpret vowel nasality. Visual full-word targets were preceded by auditory primes consisting of CV segments of CVC words with nasal vowels ([tʃɑ̃] for [tʃɑ̃d] ‘moon’), oral vowels ([tʃɑ] for [tʃɑl] ‘un…

Strong-Verb Paradigm Leveling in Four Germanic Languages: A Category Frequency Approach

2010

We investigated strong-verb paradigm leveling in German, Dutch, English, and Swedish, and found significant differences in ablaut leveling and class change towards the weak conjugation. Swedish favors ablaut patterns retaining a difference between the preterite and the past participle, while German, Dutch, and English favor a common vowel for both forms. In change from the strong to the weak conjugation in Swedish, the preterite is more resistant than the past participle, while in the other languages it is the reverse. We provide a unified explanation for these facts based on differences in category frequency due to the prominence or lack of an aspectual distinction between preterite and pe…