Poznan09



Introduction to Experimental Phonology
Mary Ann Walter

In this introductory course we’ll learn about ways to test phonological theories experimentally, and ways that experimental work has contributed to theory development. To focus this vast topic, discussion will center on categorical perception experiments – a foundational type of phonological experiment. Along the way we’ll discuss experimental techniques and procedures, how these may affect outcomes, and how they might be modified for different subject populations. The goal is not to learn laboratory facts, but to gain practical experience in a way of thinking.

Readings (to be made available electronically):
Abramson, A.S. & Lisker, L. Discriminability along the voicing continuum: Cross-language tests. In Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 569-573). Prague: Academia, 1970.

Byers-Heinlein, K. and J. Werker. 2009. Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: Infants’ langauge experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental Science.

Coady, J. and J. Evans, E. Mainela-Arnold, K. Kluender. 2007. Children with specific language impairments perceive speech most categorically when tokens are natural and meaningful. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 50, 41-57.

Ganong, W. F. 1980. Phonetic categorization in auditory perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 6, 110–125.

Kazanina, N. and C. Phillips, B. Idsardi. 2006. The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(30), 11381-11386.

Kuhl, P. and J. Miller. 1978. Speech perception by the chinchilla: Identification functions for synthetic VOT stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63(3), 905-917.

Lisker, L., & Abramson, A.S. The voicing dimension: Some experiments in comparative phonetics. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 563-567). Prague: Academia, 1970.

McClelland, J. and J. Fiez, B. McCandliss. 2002. Teaching the /r/-/l/ discrimination to Japanese adults: behavioral and neural aspects. Physiology and Behavior 77, 657-662.

Nosofsky, R. 1988. Similarity, frequency and category representations. Journal of Experimental Psychology 14(1), 54-65.

Pisoni, D. 1973. Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels. Perception and Psychophysics 13(2), 253-260.

Serniclaes, W. and L. Sprenger-Charolles. 2003. Categorical perception of speech sounds and dyslexia. Current psychology letters 10(1).

Sharma, A. and M. Dorman. 1999. Cortical auditory evoked potential correlates of categorical perception of voice-onset time. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106(2), 1078-1083.

Werker, J. and R. Tees. 1999. Influences on infant speech processing: Toward a new synthesis. Annual Review of Psychology 50, 509-535.


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