Mandarin Chinese has dental, palatal, and retroflex sibilants, but their contrasts before [_i]
are avoided: The palatals appear before [i] while the dentals and retroflexes appear before …

The dichotomy of contrastive and allophonic phonological relationships has a long-standing
tradition in phonology, but there is growing research that points to phonological …

The term labiodentalization is used in this dissertation to describe the linguistic
phenomenon consisting in the realization of/b/, which generally corresponds to the voiced …

Abstract Costa Rican Spanish listeners associate intervocalic [z] with specific social
attributes in a matched-guise test (Chappell 2016) but experience difficulty when explicitly …

This study examines sibilant place contrast in the [_i] context in terms of its typology across
Chinese dialects and its role in the historical development of Mandarin sibilants. The …

Speech contrasts which are not functionally distinctive in the mother tongue are difficult to
differentiate perceptually for non-native listeners. A two-fold experiment was carried out in …

It has been well attested that infants and adults are able to take advantage of statistical
distributional information to acquire phonemes (Maye et al., 2002; Hayes-Harb, 2007) and …

Abstract Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of
articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with …