Tongue position in Mandarin Chinese voiceless stops.

The current study explores whether Mandarin initial and medial voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops differ in their tongue positions and post-vocalic voicing during closure. Ultrasound tongue imaging and acoustic data from five Mandarin speakers revealed (1) no consistent pattern for tongue positions among speakers, and (2) no difference in degree of voicing during closure between the two stop series. These findings suggest that tongue position is not a reliable articulatory correlate for Mandarin laryngeal contrasts. This further suggests that aspiration is not correlated with tongue position differences, unlike the reported correlation between voicing and tongue root advancement.

Perception of illusory clusters: the role of native timing.

We explore the influence of native timing patterns on nonnative speech perception, by asking whether a nonnative CVCV sequence can be perceived as CCV when the temporal organization of nonnative CVCV is similar to native CCV. To explore this question, Georgian listeners are tested on a CCa-CVCá discrimination in French. Georgian has a rich word-onset cluster inventory, with component consonants loosely timed. The loose timing often, though not always, results in a schwa-like CC transition. French, the stimulus language, exhibits tighter timing in biconsonantal clusters, no vocalic transitions, and a reduced non-prominent first vowel in CVCá sequences. We hypothesize that the cross-language difference in inter-consonantal timing can facilitate the perception of an illusory cluster when Georgian listeners hear French CVCá. The findings reveal such perceptual confusion, particularly in the CCa-CøCá contrast in which the nonnative /ø/ is phonetically similar to the CC transition in Georgian, both in terms of temporal organizations and tongue shape. This confirms the possibility of illusory clusters, which is consistent with the interpretation that Georgian listeners utilize their knowledge of how word-onset CC clusters are temporally implemented in their native language when responding to the task. We propose that the timing pattern may constitute language-specific knowledge and that it can influence the perceptual assimilation patterns in nonnative speech perception.

Generalization of spontaneous imitation from nonwords to real wordsa).

This study reports that English speakers, after shadowing English-like nonwords beginning on /p/ with extended voice onset time, spontaneously shifted their subsequent reading productions of English words converging toward the shadowing targets. The extent of the imitative changes correlated positively with the speakers' declarative memory of the nonwords, but not with the lexical frequency of the produced words. These findings provide evidence for the phoneme-level abstraction in perceptually induced phonetic drifts while they further suggest that the mechanisms underlying phonetic drifts in direct shadowing, and in subsequent productions of words differing from the shadowing targets, may not be identical.