The paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of temporal phonetic parameters cueing word boundaries in Polish. Durational variability has been well documented for different languages. Word-final lengthening, word-initial lengthening, and polysyllabic shortening, all predict that segments neighbouring a word boundary will differ in their durations whatever direction such shortening or lengthening should take. In the present study, we obtained two Polish sequences brat Adama versus brata dama from 24 native speakers of Polish. The obtained results point to a complicated pattern of temporal variability caused by the boundary location in Polish.

Speech is almost never delivered in ideal quiet conditions. On the contrary, the acoustic signal reaching a listener's ears is degraded by background noise and reverberations. The current study investigates the perception of the voicing contrast of initial stops in English by Polish non-native listeners. Previous research showed that Polish learners do not match native speakers of English in production and perception of English voiced and voiceless stops, which results from different phonetic implementations of voicing in the two languages. In the current study, two groups of Polish listeners recognised voicing of English initial stops in one-syllable words both in quiet and in six-talker babble. The results revealed different patterns of recognition for the two conditions. The place of articulation interacted significantly with voicing both in quiet and in noise, however results obtained suggest that performance in noise did not simply reflect the performance in quiet.

The paper endeavours to verify a commonly accepted observation that Polish hornorganic stop geminates are unreleased. Fifteen Polish subjects participated in the experiment, producing stop gerninates in different contexts specified for the place of articulation, articulatory tempo, and voiced-voiceless distinction. The collected samples were acoustically analysed for presence or absence of the release burst. The results do not corroborate a putative unreleased status of Polish homorganic stop geminates. They show, however, that the frequency of released geminates strongly depends on the place of articulation, with dental It, dl released most frequently. Voiceless stops tend to be more readily released than voiced stops, though this tendency is only close to significant. Moreover, a significant impact of the tempo of articulation on the occurrence of the release burst has been demonstrated for both voiced and voiceless stops - longer utterances are conducive to unreleased realisations of geminates.

The paper aims to present the phenomenon of categorization in speech perception. It commences with showing the diversity and distribution of speech sounds in the world's languages. Next, certain distributional tendencies, such as back vowel rounding and low vowel nasalization, are presented and discussed in the light of auditory and acoustic principles. Categorical perception, as the pivotal concept of the paper, is delineated from a procedural and methodological point of view. Last but not least, the article discusses the arguments against categorization is speech perception as well as various attempts to define a unit of perception other than a phonetic segment As a conclusion, proposals for the reconciliation between categorical and continuous modes of perception are shown.

In the current study, we test the discrimination of four basic English tone contours in monosyllabic words by Polish learners using an AXB task and we compare these results to the results of an identification test. Discrimination does not require access to phonological labels and is claimed to tap core auditory mechanism. Relatively high discrimination performance by Polish learners and poor identification performance indicate that difficulties with correct identification of English tones are solely difficulties with labelling.

Geminates (such as the double /k/ in Polish lekki “light”) form a group of consonants that are mainly characterized by longer durations than the corresponding singletons. Most of the research has concentrated on durational and spectral properties of geminates in contrast to singletons. Much less attention has been paid to the realization of the voicing contrast in geminates and whether it is differently implemented than in singletons. In the current study, we contribute to this research with the data from Polish stop geminates. To this end, a total of 49 native speakers of Polish produced all stop geminates and corresponding singletons in wordforms of the same phonological make-up. The measurements included closure duration, voicing ratio, duration and mean intensity of the release burst. The results showed that the voicing ratio was 0.69, classifying Polish stop geminates as mildly devoiced. There was a significant speaker-dependent variability in that some speakers devoiced all geminates, while others either partially devoiced or never devoiced. The analysis of interactions between geminates and singletons revealed that geminates cancelled voicing cues observed in singletons such as longer durations and lower intensity of the release burst. We discuss the current results in terms of voicing implementation in Polish and in relation to other geminating languages.