Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest in the humanities. It can yield important insights into biological, linguistic, cognitive, and social features of language. The big challenge is to find out which speaker- and listener-specific details are crucial. This book introduces such details from various perspectives.

Including contributions from a team of world-renowned international scholars, this volume is a state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, showcasing new empirical studies alongside critical reviews of existing influential speech learning models. It presents a revised version of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) for the first time, an update on a cornerstone of second language research. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical progress, segmental acquisition, acquiring suprasegmental features, accentedness and acoustic features, and cognitive and psychological variables. Every chapter provides new empirical evidence, offering new insights as well as challenges on aspects of the second language speech acquisition process. Comprehensive in its coverage, this book summarises the state of current research in second language phonology, and aims to shape and inspire future research in the field. It is an essential resource for academic researchers and students of second language acquisition, applied linguistics and phonetics and phonology.

The idea that speech is a dynamic process is a tautology: whether from the standpoint of the talker, the listener, or the engineer, speech is an action, a sound, or a signal continuously changing in time. Yet, because phonetics and speech science are offspring of classical phonology, speech has been viewed as a sequence of discrete events-positions of the articulatory apparatus, waveform segments, and phonemes. Although this perspective has been mockingly referred to as "beads on a string", from the time of Henry Sweet's 19th century treatise almost up to our days specialists of speech science and speech technology have continued to conceptualize the speech signal as a sequence of static states interleaved with transitional elements reflecting the quasi-continuous nature of vocal production. This book, a collection of papers of which each looks at speech as a dynamic process and highlights one of its particularities, is dedicated to the memory of Ludmilla Andreevna Chistovich. At the outset, it was planned to be a Chistovich festschrift but, sadly, she passed away a few months before the book went to press. The 24 chapters of this volume testify to the enormous influence that she and her colleagues have had over the four decades since the publication of their 1965 monograph.

Through several reviews and original work, the book focuses on three key topics: first, the role of real-time auditory feedback in learning, second, the role of motor aspects for learning and memory, and third, representations in memory and the role of sleep on memory consolidation.

This volume presents the findings of a large-scale study of individual differences in spoken (and heard) language development during the school years. The goal of the study was to investigate the degree to which language abilities at school entry were stable over time and influential in the child’s overall success in important aspects of development. The methodology was a longitudinal study of over 600 children in the US Midwest during a 10-year period. The language skills of these children -- along with reading, academic, and psychosocial outcomes -- were measured. There was intentional oversampling of children with poor language ability without being associated with other developmental or sensory disorders. Furthermore, these children could be sub-grouped based on their nonverbal abilities, such that one group represents children with specific language impairment (SLI), and the other group with nonspecific language impairment (NLI) represents poor language along with depressed nonverbal abilities. Throughout the book, the authors consider whether these distinctions are supported by evidence obtained in this study and which aspects of development are impacted by poor language ability. Data are provided that allow conclusions to be made regarding the level of risk associated with different degrees of poor language and whether this risk should be viewed as lying on a continuum. The volume will appeal to researchers and professionals with an interest in children’s language development, particularly those working with children who have a range of language impairments. This includes Speech and Language Pathologists; Child Neuropsychologists; Clinical Psychologists working in Education, as well as Psycholinguists and Developmental Psychologists.

This book addresses important issues of speech processing and language learning in Chinese. It highlights perception and production of speech in healthy and clinical populations and in children and adults. This book provides diverse perspectives and reviews of cutting-edge research in past decades on how Chinese speech is processed and learned. Along with each chapter, future research directions have been discussed. With these unique features and the broad coverage of topics, this book appeals to not only scholars and students who study speech perception in preverbal infants and in children and adults learning Chinese, but also to teachers with interests in pedagogical applications in teaching Chinese as Second Language.

This book aims to develop a framework for a fully explanatory theory of speech production and speech perception. It emphasises the difference between static models (primarily descriptive) and dynamic models that attempt to show how the basic linguistics and phonetics are related in an actual human speaker/listener.

The brain is a complicated and intricately woven structure relative to other body tissues. It is the ultimate parallel processing system, but nevertheless an alien structure whose way and manner of workings remain largely unknown despite an amazing amount of information amassed over the years from concerted research efforts. One area of interest to diverse scholars in the humanities and biological sciences is how the brain deals with speech, especially the coordination of incoming and outgoing signals. Essays in Speech Processes presents reports of theoretical and experimental studies from extant researches specifically dwelling the areas of: phonetics, neurolinguistics, neuroethology, and stuttering.

The Handbook of Speech Perception is a collection of forward-looking articles that offer a summary of the technical and theoretical accomplishments in this vital area of research on language. Now available in paperback, this uniquely comprehensive companion brings together in one volume the latest research conducted in speech perception Contains original contributions by leading researchers in the field Illustrates technical and theoretical accomplishments and challenges across the field of research and language Adds to a growing understanding of the far-reaching relevance of speech perception in the fields of phonetics, audiology and speech science, cognitive science, experimental psychology, behavioral neuroscience, computer science, and electrical engineering, among others.

This dissertation, "Relationships Among Individual Differences in Speech Perception, Speech Production, and Cognitive Functions: a Case Study of Cantonese Tone Merger" by Jinghua, Ou, 歐靜樺, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Studies of speech processing have generally made the implicit assumption that typically developed speakers can distinguish all sounds of their mother tongue in perception and production. As such, individual differences in speech processing is usually studied with speakers differing in training/experience (Strait & Kraus, 2011), or populations with developmental disorders (Facoetti et al., 2010), and few investigations have been conducted without the effects from training/experience among typically-developed individuals. However, sociolinguists have long recognized that native speakers vary in their ability to discriminate speech sounds in their language, and enormous variability exists especially during a sound change in progress. Taking the opportunity of an on-going tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese, this thesis aims to systematically investigate individual differences of native speech perception, production, and their relationships with cognitive functions among typically-developed speakers. Three participant groups were recruited, who presented respectively the pattern of good perception and good production of all Cantonese tones []Per+Pro], that of good perception of all tones but poor production of specifically the T2/T5 distinction []Per-Pro], and that of poor perception and production of specifically the T2/T5 distinction [-Per-Pro]. Behavioral and neural measures of tone perception included reaction time, discrimination sensitivity index, and components of event-related potentials (ERPs) - the mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and rise time of amplitude envelope. Acoustic measurements were used to evaluate tone production in terms of both pitch and amplitude rise time. Components of attention and working memory in auditory and visual modalities are assessed with published cognitive test batteries. The results show that, apart from the expected differences in accuracy and discrimination sensitivity of tone perception, both []Per-Pro] and [-Per-Pro] took significantly longer to discriminate between tones than []Per+Pro]. As for the performance in production, besides the differences in pitch offset, both []Per-Pro] and [-Per-Pro] showed decreased differentiation in rise time between the two rising tones in production, compared with []Per+Pro].With respect to the brain responses reflected in the MMN and P3a to pitch deviations among tones, [-Per-Pro] showed smaller and slower responses than one or both of the other two groups, but []Per+Pro] and []Per-Pro] did not differ from each other. However, both []Per-Pro] and [-Per-Pro] showed weaker neural responses compared with []Per+Pro] to the rise time of T5. In addition, [-Per-Pro] was poorer in tasks pertaining to the ability of attention switching/shifting regardless of modality than one or both of the other two groups, but []Per+Pro] and []Per-Pro] did not differ from each other. Further correlation and regression analyses reveal that both pitch contour/height and rise time contributed to distinctive perception and production of rising tones, measures of perception (behavioral and neural) and production were correlated with each other, and attentional shifting in visual and auditory modalities significantly predicted performances of discrimination and production. Taken together, the findings of the present study suggest that attentional switching