Search results for "syllable"
showing 10 items of 51 documents
The neural basis of sublexical speech and corresponding nonspeech processing: a combined EEG-MEG study.
2014
Abstract We addressed the neural organization of speech versus nonspeech sound processing by investigating preattentive cortical auditory processing of changes in five features of a consonant–vowel syllable (consonant, vowel, sound duration, frequency, and intensity) and their acoustically matched nonspeech counterparts in a simultaneous EEG–MEG recording of mismatch negativity (MMN/MMNm). Overall, speech–sound processing was enhanced compared to nonspeech sound processing. This effect was strongest for changes which affect word meaning (consonant, vowel, and vowel duration) in the left and for the vowel identity change in the right hemisphere also. Furthermore, in the right hemisphere, spe…
Syllable onsets are perceptual reading units
2007
Syllable onsets are defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster in a syllable (e.g., BR in BREAD). In the present study, using a letter detection paradigm and French words, we tested whether syllable onsets are processed as units by the reading system. In Experiment 1, we replicated Gross, Treiman, and Inman's (2000) result of observing no difference between the detection latencies of letters embedded in a multi-letter syllable onset (e.g., c in ECLATER) relative to a single-letter syllable onset (e.g., C in ECARTER). In Experiment 2, participants took longer to detect the target letter when it was in the second position of a multi-letter onset (e.g., L in TABLIER) than when it wa…
Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition
2005
International audience; Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only-not the second-produced facilitation in both the lexical decision and the naming tasks. These findings suggest that, for polysyllabic words, phonological codes are computed sequentially during silent reading and reading aloud.
Sonority as a Phonological Cue in Early Perception of Written Syllables in French
2020
Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies that go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how—and why—readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, and readers could be sensitive to sonority—a universal phonological element—for processing (pseudo)words. Here, …
Pronunciare bene. Fonetica italiana e tedesca a confronto
2017
Come si fa ad acquisire una buona pronuncia? Questo libro – che si rivolge a italofoni che studiano o insegnano il tedesco e a germanofoni che studiano o insegnano l’italiano – mette a disposizione tutto il background teorico necessario per quanto riguarda la pronuncia di entrambe le lingue. La descrizione in parallelo dell’italiano e del tedesco fornisce le basi per un confronto tra i due differenti sistemi fonologici. Che cosa hanno in comune e in che cosa si differenziano? Quali errori ci si può aspettare dagli italofoni che si esprimono in tedesco e dai germanofoni che si esprimono in italiano? Grazie a quali accorgimenti si possono evitare gli errori riuscendo così a “pronunciare bene”…
D’Achille, P., 2010. L’italiano contemporaneo. Bologne : Il Mulino
2014
We make here the review of Paolo D’Achille’s L’italiano contemporaneo. The author deals with a lot of themes concerning contemporary Italian in this book: the situation of Italian language today (the fact that it is spoken along with dialects, its main characteristics, the italiano standard and the italiano dell’uso medio or neostandard); the onomastics (the first names, the ergonyms…); the lexicon (the basic Italian, the loan words…); the phonetics and the phonology (the Italian phonemes and the question of the consonant’s length, the structure of the syllable…); the inflected morphology (the system of the pronouns and the system of the verb and their innovations…); the lexical morphology …
The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing
2004
There is now growing evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical regularities embedded into linguistic utterances, but the exact nature of the distributional information to which human performance is sensitive is an issue that has been surprisingly neglected as yet. In order to address this issue, we first propose an overview of some basic measures of association, going from the simple co-occurrence frequency to the normative measure of contingency, rw: We then report an experiment collecting judgments of word-likeness as a function of the relationship between the phonemes composing the rimes (VC). The contingency between Vs and Cs, as assessed by rw; was the best predictor of chi…
Neutralization of Syllable-final Voicing in German
1985
German is well known for its neutralization of the voicing contrast in word-final obstruents. However, acoustic analysis of ten pairs of German words produced by ten native speakers revealed that the distributions of acoustic parameters for underlying voiced and voiceless stops are significantly different, despite considerable overlap between the two categories. Furthermore, in a listening test, German listeners were able to distinguish the voiced and voiceless pairs with about 60% accuracy—significantly better than chance. Several mechanisms for such a “semicontrast” are considered, including the possibility that it is an experimental artifact. It is concluded that this is not an artifact,…
Illusory conjunctions in French: The nature of sublexical units in visual word recognition
2005
The respective influence of orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg, 1987) and syllable boundaries (Rapp, 1992) on reading units in French was tested in three experiments, using the illusory conjunction paradigm (Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986). Bigram boundaries were defined according to bigram frequencies. The data showed that the syllable effect was attenuated or cancelled when syllable boundaries did not coincide with bigram boundaries. Reading units were defined by syllable and orthographic information. The implications of such findings for the dual route theory and the PDP model are discussed.
Naming pseudowords in Spanish: effects of syllable frequency.
2003
Three naming experiments were conducted to examine the role of the first and the second syllable during speech production in Spanish. Facilitative effects of syllable frequency with disyllabic words have been reported in Dutch and Spanish (Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994; Perea & Carreiras, 1998). In both cases, the syllable frequency effect was independent of-and additive to-the effect of word frequency. However, Levelt and Wheeldon (1994) found that words ending in a high-frequency syllable were named faster than words ending in a low-frequency syllable, whereas Perea and Carreiras (1998) found a facilitative effect of syllable frequency for the initial syllable. In Experiments 1-2, we manipulate…