Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh[ts], ch[ts[superscript h]], z[ts], c[ts[superscript h]], j[tc], q[tc[superscript h]), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

In-depth analysis of a large corpus of English and German beginning consonant and syllable stress errors revealed that claims regarding these errors can not be replicated for Spanish, leading to the development of hypotheses focusing on Spanish as a pre-final-stress and syllable-timed language. (38 references) (Author/CB)