Michael C. Stern

Yale University | YU · Department of Linguistics

Previous work has demonstrated that words are hyperarticulated on dimensions of speech that differentiate them from a minimal pair competitor. This phenomenon has been termed contrastive hyperarticulation (CH). We present a dynamic neural field (DNF) model of voice onset time (VOT) planning that derives CH from an inhibitory influence of the minima...

The present study investigated the effects of language dominance during bilingual comprehension of relative clauses. We asked whether language dominance, operationalized as a continuous variable, modulates whether/how Spanish-English bilinguals exhibit a relative clause subject-object processing asymmetry in their first-learned language, Spanish. H...

We conducted a visual world eye-tracking experiment with highly proficient Spanish-English bilingual adults to investigate the effects of relative language dominance, operationalized as a continuous, multidimensional variable, on the time course of relative clause processing in the first-learned language, Spanish. We found that participants exhibit...

Previous evidence from category goodness rating tasks has demonstrated that the phonetic reflexes of phonological categories have internal structure, such that some signals are better cues to phonological category membership than others. Puzzlingly, the best-rated exemplars of peripheral vowel categories have often been observed to be more peripher...

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of dominance in typologically different languages, such as Turkish and English. Developing robust measures of dominance is especially important and challenging for this population, since most methods to measure dominance rely on syntax or grammatical structures. We compared measures that probe...

We investigated the influence of the L1 Mandarin grammar on the interpretation of (ungrammatical) bare nouns in L2 English. We found a subject/object asymmetry in the interpretation of definiteness on L2 English bare nouns, analogous to the asymmetry in Mandarin. Future work will tease apart syntactic from discourse-level constraints on the interpr...

We used identification and goodness rating tasks to investigate the cognitive representation of 'category goodness' or 'prototypicality' in two different speech sound categories. The results suggest that corner vowel prototypicality has a qualitatively different kind of representation than non-corner vowel prototypicality.

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on...

An eye-tracking experiment in the Visual World Paradigm was conducted to examine the effects of language history on the predictive parsing of sentences containing relative clauses in the first-learned language of fluent bilingual adults. We compared heritage speakers of Spanish (HSs)—who had spent most of their lives immersed in an English-dominant...

An experimental investigation of the role of bilingual perceptual magnet effects in contact-induced sound change

Experimental investigation of the perceptual magnet effect in American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals