Previous studies have reported perceptual advantages, such as when discriminating non-native linguistic or musical pitch differences, among first-year infants growing up in bilingual over monolingual environments. It is unclear whether such effects should be attributed to bilinguals’ enhanced… read more
This paper examines the nature of categorical perception (CP) effects in Mandarin and Dutch adult listeners through identification and discrimination tasks using lexical tonal contrasts and through the CP index analysis. In identification tasks, Mandarin listeners identify tones in accordance… read more
Previous studies investigating possible differences between monolingual and bilingual infants’ vocabulary development have produced mixed results. The current study examines the size of the total receptive and expressive vocabulary, total conceptual vocabulary, and specific Dutch vocabulary of… read more
In Dutch, onset /v/ is becoming voiceless. Regional differences have been
observed in the degree of devoicing and in the acoustic implementation of the
/v/–/f/ contrast. We test whether these regional differences – reflecting different
stages of the change in progress – are reflected in perception.… read more
We consider two theories of laryngeal representation, one using a single feature [voice] generalizing across prevoicing languages and aspiration languages, and the other using multiple features: [voice] for pre-voicing languages and [spread glottis] for aspiration languages. We derive predictions… read more