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      Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners

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          Abstract

          In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts such as bi-bbi or sir-ssir. That is, French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final voiceless stops than to either voiced murmur or frication duration of fully voiced stops or voiceless fricatives in word-initial position. We propose, tentatively, that native speakers of French, a language in which gemination is usually not considered to be phonemic, have not acquired quantity contrasts but yet exhibit a presumably universal sensitivity to rhythm, whereby listeners are able to perceive and compare the relative temporal distance between beats given by successive salient phonetic events such as a sequence of vowel nuclei.

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          Most cited references30

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          Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys.

          Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.
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            Perceptual adjustment to highly compressed speech: effects of talker and rate changes.

            This study investigated the perceptual adjustments that occur when listeners recognize highly compressed speech. In Experiment 1, adjustment was examined as a function of the amount of exposure to compressed speech by use of 2 different speakers and compression rates. The results demonstrated that adjustment takes place over a number of sentences, depending on the compression rate. Lower compression rates required less experience before full adjustment occurred. In Experiment 2, the impact of an abrupt change in talker characteristics was investigated; in Experiment 3, the impact of an abrupt change in compression rate was studied. The results of these 2 experiments indicated that sudden changes in talker characteristics or compression rate had little impact on the adjustment process. The findings are discussed with respect to the level of speech processing at which such adjustment might occur.
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              Duration discrimination of noise and tone bursts.

              Brent Abel (1972)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                01 March 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 209
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Laboratoire Phonétique et Phonologie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Paris, France
                [2] 2Laboratoire Mémoire et Cognition, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale Paris, France
                [3] 3Haskins Laboratories New Haven, CT, USA
                [4] 4MARCS Institute and School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia
                Author notes

                Edited by: Sophie Dufour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Aix-Marseille University, France

                Reviewed by: Laurence White, Plymouth University, UK; Angèle Brunellière, Université Lille Nord de France, France

                *Correspondence: Pierre A. Hallé pierre.halle@ 123456univ-paris3.fr

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00209
                4771936
                26973551
                f9d76a38-03ec-424f-adaa-f08b78de2bcc
                Copyright © 2016 Hallé, Ridouane and Best.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 30 July 2014
                : 03 February 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 8, Tables: 4, Equations: 0, References: 83, Pages: 15, Words: 12482
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                nonnative speech perception,tashlhiyt berber,french,geminate obstruents,timing perception

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