Saltatory alternations ‘skip over’ intermediate sounds, as in k~s skipping over [t]. Recent research has argued that saltation is diachronically unstable and documented one possible cause of instability: Learners exposed to saltatory alternations may overgeneralize them to intermediate sounds. However, this research has trained participants to criterion or excluded participants who did not reach criterion accuracy on familiar sounds. In first language acquisition, learners of languages with s...

This paper investigates the relationship between speech perception and linguistic experience in Kaqchikel, a Guatemalan Mayan language. Our empirical focus is the perception of plain, ejective, and implosive stops. Drawing on an AX discrimination task, a corpus of spoken Kaqchikel, and a text corpus, we make two claims. First, we argue that speech perception is mediated by phonemic representations which include acoustic detail drawn from prior phonetic experience, as in Exemplar Theory. Secon...

Speakers with vowel categories that are considered merged by traditional measures (e.g., F1 and F2 measurements at a single time point) may contrast vowel classes in dimensions beyond vowel quality, such as duration. Durational differences among vowel classes have been observed to persist even in cases of spectral overlap (e.g., Fridland et al., 2014; Labov & Baranowski, 2006), suggesting that duration may serve as a contrastive cue among spectrally-merged or near-merged vowel classes. Th...

This study examines the effects of stress on the stop burst in five languages differing in number of places of articulation, as reflected in burst duration, spectral centre of gravity, and ­spectral standard deviation. The languages studied are English (three places of articulation /p t k/), the Indonesian language Makasar (four places /p t c k/), and the Central Australian languages ­Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri (both five places /p t ʈ c k/), and Arrernte (six places /p t̪ t ʈ c k/). We find th...

The challenge of prosodic annotation is reflected in commonly reported variability among trained annotators in the assignment of prosodic labels. The present study examines individual differences in the perception of prosody through the lens of prosodic annotation. First, Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) reveal the non-linear pattern of some acoustic cues on the perception of prosodic features. Second, these same models reveal that while some of the untrained annotators are using the...