Shorter Voice Onset Time Research Articles

A multidimensional characterization of the neurocognitive architecture underlying age-related temporal speech processing

Healthy aging is often associated with speech comprehension difficulties in everyday life situations despite a pure-tone hearing threshold in the normative range. Drawing on this background, we used a multidimensional approach to assess the functional and structural neural correlates underlying age-related temporal speech processing while controlling for pure-tone hearing acuity. Accordingly, we combined structural magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, and collected behavioral data while younger and older adults completed a phonetic categorization and discrimination task with consonant-vowel syllables varying along a voice-onset time continuum. The behavioral results confirmed age-related temporal speech processing singularities which were reflected in a shift of the boundary of the psychometric categorization function, with older adults perceiving more syllable characterized by a short voice-onset time as /ta/ compared to younger adults. Furthermore, despite the absence of any between-group differences in phonetic discrimination abilities, older adults demonstrated longer N100/P200 latencies as well as increased P200 amplitudes while processing the consonant-vowel syllables varying in voice-onset time. Finally, older adults also exhibited a divergent anatomical gray matter infrastructure in bilateral auditory-related and frontal brain regions, as manifested in reduced cortical thickness and surface area. Notably, in the younger adults but not in the older adult cohort, cortical surface area in these two gross anatomical clusters correlated with the categorization of consonant-vowel syllables characterized by a short voice-onset time, suggesting the existence of a critical gray matter threshold that is crucial for consistent mapping of phonetic categories varying along the temporal dimension. Taken together, our results highlight the multifaceted dimensions of age-related temporal speech processing characteristics, and pave the way toward a better understanding of the relationships between hearing, speech and the brain in older age.

Modelling of Arabic Plosive and Fricative Acoustic Characteristics Articulated by Malay Native Speakers

This study aims to examine the pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized Arabic sounds produced by Malay speakers based on acoustic phonetic approach and to investigate its relation with the second language learning model proposed by Flege (1995). The plosive and fricative associated with the pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized of Arabic sounds is one of the main problems among non-Arabic native speakers in learning Arabic language. Recent studies emphasize the influence of the first language / mother tongue language as the cause of the failure to master the Arabic language as the second language. Hence the frameworks of the similar, different and new sound hypotheses proposed by Flege (1995) were used to get the real picture of the Arabic language speech phenomenon in the second language condition. PRAAT software was used to obtain speech data in the spectrogram and to undergo spectrograph analysis. Subsequently, the findings were analyzed using SPSS to highlight the overall results of the study more thoroughly. VOT (Voice Onset Time) acoustic parameters for the plosive sound and frication of the frication sounds were used during the spectrograph analysis. A total of 2880 spectrogram data were obtained from the subjects: 24 undergraduates from the Bachelor of Islamic Studies with Honors (Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilization) UKM. The results of the production experiment show that Malay plosive sound has negative VOT for voiced stop and short positive VOT for voiceless stop, while Arabic plosive sounds has a model pattern voicing lead versus long lag for voiced and voiceless stops respectively. The results show that Arabic voiceless stop / ت / is aspirated and found to has a longer VOT than Malay voiceless stop /t/. For Arabic pharyngealized sounds, the results show higher values of F1 than non-pharyngealized sounds. In addition, Arabic pharyngealized sounds are found to have shorter VOT than non-pharyngealized Arabic sounds. The findings showed that there were cases where subjects managed to replicate the L2 sound to similar sound of L1 and there were cases of L2 sounds that are foreign to the sound system of L1. With that in mind, it can be emphasized that some studies have supported Flege’s theory that the similar sound between L1 and L2 are not necessarily easy to pronounce, while there are L2 phonemes that are absent in L1, but they are easily learnt by the L2 speaker.

AUDIOWIZUALNA PERCEPCJA MOWY W OBUUSZNYCH I ROZDZIELNOUSZNYCH WARUNKACH SŁUCHOWYCH

BackgroundSpeech perception is multisensory, relying on auditory as well as visual information from the articulators. Watching articulatory gestures which are either congruent or incongruent with the speech audio can change the auditory percept, indicating that there is a complex integration of auditory and visual stimuli. A speech segment is comprised of distinctive features, notably voice onset time (VOT) and place of articulation (POA). Understanding the importance of each of these features for audiovisual (AV) speech perception is critical. The present study investigated the perception of AV consonant-vowel (CV) syllables with various VOTs and POAs under two conditions: diotic incongruent and dichotic congruent.Material and methodsAV stimuli comprised diotic and dichotic CV syllables with stop consonants (bilabial /pa/ and /ba/; alveolar /ta/ and /da/; and velar /ka/ and /ɡa/) presented with congruent and incongruent video CV syllables with stop consonants. There were 40 righthanded normal hearing young adults (20 females, mean age 23 years, <i>SD</i> = 2.4 years) and 20 males (mean age 24 years, <i>SD</i> = 2.1 years) who participated in the experiment.ResultsIn the diotic incongruent AV condition, short VOT (voiced CV syllables) of the visual segments were identified when auditory segments had a CV syllable with long VOT (unvoiced CV syllables). In the dichotic congruent AV condition, there was an increase in identification of the audio segment when the subject was presented with a video segment congruent to either ear, in this way overriding the otherwise presented ear advantage in dichotic listening. Distinct visual salience of bilabial stop syllables had greater visual influence (observed as greater identification scores) than velar stop syllables and thus overrode the acoustic dominance of velar syllables.ConclusionsThe findings of the present study have important implications for understanding the perception of diotic incongruent and dichotic congruent audiovisual CV syllables in which the stop consonants have different VOT and POA combinations. Earlier findings on the effect of VOT on dichotic listening can be extended to AV speech having dichotic auditory segments.

Effect of emphasis spread on VOT in coronal stops in Qatari Arabic

Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic co-articulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /ṭ/ adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.

Realisation of Voice Onset Time (VOT) and Its Implication on Voicing of English (RP) Stops in Ghanaian English (GhE)

There has been a general perception that the English voiced stops /b, d, g/ before and after a pause or silence are more often confused with the initial voiceless stops /p, t, k/. Thus, in distinguishing the two, listeners most often depend on the onset of voicing of the following segments. Voice onset time, therefore, serves as a significant cue in distinguishing English voiced stops from their voiceless counterparts. Interestingly, voiceless stops in many Ghanaian indigenous languages appear to be weakly aspirated; they are perceived to be made with a very short voice onset time. However, listeners are able to distinguish the voiceless stops from their voiced counterparts. What this study sought to do was to investigate the production of English initial voiceless stops, /p, t, k/ in Ghanaian English. Specifically, it sought to examine the voice onset time of the stops, and whether listeners are able to distinguish English stops made with weak aspiration from the voiced stops before and after a pause. The study used 112 Ghanaian speakers, 76 for a production test; they produced 21 tokens of the stops in a /p/-, /t/- and /k/- initial words, and 36 for a perception test; they listened to words produced with voiced stops in a /b-b/, /d-d/ and /g-g/ environments. The study has revealed that for all the voiceless stops, voicing for the following segments began after the stops were released, and there was no pre-voicing or voice lead. However, for some of the stops, voicing coincided with the release, while for some voicing began after an appreciable amount of time after the release burst. The length of the VOT was found to have been affected by place of articulation and vowel contexts. However, speaker sex seems to have no effect on the length of the VOT. It is clear that Ghanaian speakers of English would have no difficulty distinguishing weakly aspirated stops from voiced stops before and after a pause. Also, understanding words having the initial voiced stops before and after a pause and weakly aspirated stops produced by Ghanaians will not be a problem to listeners.

Cambios en el voice onset time en hablantes franceses de entre 40 y 80 años de edad

IntroductionThis study explores the ways in which ageing affects speech production. Older individuals present many changes in processes of motor control, as well as in the integrity of laryngeal and supralaryngeal muscles, which may affect speech production. However, few studies have addressed these capacities in the context of healthy ageing, especially in French-speaking people. MethodsThe study focused on voice onset time (VOT), a feature of speech that is particularly relevant in the study of the temporal and spatial coordination of laryngeal and supralaryngeal gestures. We recruited French-speaking individuals, who were grouped according to age, as follows: 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, and 70-79 years. They were asked to perform a pseudoword repetition task including the 6 voiced and voiceless occlusives that exist in the French language: /p, t, k, b, d, g/. ResultsWe observed a longer duration of pseudowords in participants older than 70 years (F[3,847] = 352; p = .02), probably due to slowing of speech movements. In the 70-79 years age group, further difficulties were detected with voice onset and maintenance during occlusion. This resulted in shorter VOT (delayed prevoicing) (F[3,848] = 5.23; p = .001), as well as incomplete voicing (interruption of voicing before opening) of voiced occlusives at the beginning of /b, d, g/ words (F[3,422] = 3.01; p = .03); this, in turn, led to a reduction in the difference in VOT between voiced and voiceless sounds. DiscussionOur results indicate difficulties in the coordination of articulator movements, suggesting an age-related decline in the motor control of speech.

The Effect of Instructed Second Language Learning on the Acoustic Properties of First Language Speech

This paper reports on a comprehensive phonetic study of American classroom learners of Russian, investigating the influence of the second language (L2) on the first language (L1). Russian and English productions of 20 learners were compared to 18 English monolingual controls focusing on the acoustics of word-initial and word-final voicing. The results demonstrate that learners’ Russian was acoustically different from their English, with shorter voice onset times (VOTs) in [−voice] stops, longer prevoicing in [+voice] stops, more [−voice] stops with short lag VOTs and more [+voice] stops with prevoicing, indicating a degree of successful L2 pronunciation learning. Crucially, learners also demonstrated an L1 phonetic change compared to monolingual English speakers. Specifically, the VOT of learners’ initial English voiceless stops was shortened, indicating assimilation with Russian, while the frequency of prevoicing in learners’ English was decreased, indicating dissimilation with Russian. Word-final, the duration of preceding vowels, stop closures, frication, and voicing during consonantal constriction all demonstrated drift towards Russian norms of word-final voicing neutralization. The study confirms that L2-driven phonetic changes in L1 are possible even in L1-immersed classroom language learners, challenging the role of reduced L1 use and highlighting the plasticity of the L1 phonetic system.

Sociophonetic voice onset time variation in Mississippi English.

Differences in the way voice onset time (VOT) is used across languages to maintain stop voicing contrasts have been well-documented, but less research has focused on VOT variation within voicing categories. For example, native English speakers are generally reported to produce word-initial voiced stops with short positive VOTs, but within category differences connected to self-reported gender and ethnicity have been reported in one preliminary study, with male speakers prevoicing more than female speakers and with African American speakers prevoicing more than Caucasian American speakers. For the current study, native speakers of English from Mississippi were recorded reading three repetitions of a pseudo-randomized list of words designed to investigate the connections between gender, ethnicity, and prevoicing of word-initial voiced stops. Participants self-identified their gender and ethnicity in an open-ended language background survey completed after recordings. Significant ethnicity, but not gender, differences were found, with African American speakers prevoicing voiced stops far more than their Caucasian American counterparts. Presumably, this difference is linked, not to ethnicity, but to dialect. These findings suggest that dialectal differences play a role in the VOT variation of word-initial voiced stops and that prevoicing may be a heretofore unidentified characteristic of African American English.

I Scream for Ice Cream: Resolving Lexical Ambiguity with Sub-phonemic Information.

This study uses a response mouse-tracking paradigm to examine the role of sub-phonemic information in online lexical ambiguity resolution of continuous speech. We examine listeners' sensitivity to the sub-phonemic information that is specific to the ambiguous internal open juncture /s/-stop sequences in American English (e.g., "place kin" vs. "play skin"), that is, voice onset time (VOT) indicating different degrees of aspiration (e.g., long VOT for "kin" vs. short VOT for "skin") in connected speech contexts. A cross-splicing method was used to create two-word sequences (e.g., "place kin" or "play skin") with matching VOTs (long for "kin"; short for "skin") or mismatching VOTs (short for "kin"; long for "skin"). Participants (n = 20) heard the two-word sequences, while looking at computer displays with the second word in the left/right corner ("KIN" and "SKIN"). Then, listeners' click responses and mouse movement trajectories were recorded. Click responses show significant effects of VOT manipulation, while mouse trajectories do not. Our results show that stop-release information, whether temporal or spectral, can (mis)guide listeners' interpretation of the possible location of a word boundary between /s/ and a following stop, even when other aspects in the acoustic signal (e.g., duration of /s/) point to the alternative segmentation. Taken together, our results suggest that segmentation and lexical access are highly attuned to bottom-up phonetic information; our results have implications for a model of spoken language recognition with position-specific representations available at the prelexical level and also allude to the possibility that detailed phonetic information may be stored in the listeners' lexicons.

On the Acquisition of English Voiceless Stop VOT by Indonesian-English Bilinguals: Evidence of Input Frequency

The paper attempted to investigate the acquisition of Voice Onset Time (VOT) of voiceless stop consonants of English /p/, /t/, and /k/ by Indonesian-English bilingual children in its close relation to how second language (L2) input shapes the L2 VOT production. It looked at two types of bilingual participants; (1) one 6-year-old participant receiving extensive input of English natives from YouTube in about 8 hours per day since she was two in addition to having an interactive communication in English with her family members (2) four students (aged 7-8 years old) of International Class Program with non-native environment of English. Both groups were residing in Malang, East Java, Indonesia at the time of data collection. The comparative analysis concluded that the VOT valued differ significantly across different inputs. The participants with non native input acquired much shorter VOTs falling within the average of 28 – 36 ms, while the one with native input could achieve native-like VOTs in the average of 69 ms for /p/ and /t/ and even longer for stop consonant /k/. Contributing factors of individual differences might arrive from input frequency levels, types of inputs, and complexities of phonological properties of Indonesian and English.

The role of voice onset time in the perception of English voicing contrasts in children’s speech

The perception of phonemic voicing distinctions is typically attributed mainly to voice onset time (VOT). Most previous research focusing on voicing discrimination used synthetic speech stimuli varying in VOT. Results of this work suggest that adult listeners show stable crossover boundaries in the 20-35 ms range. However, no research has evaluated how VOT values correspond to adult labeling regardless of whether the intended target is voiced or voiceless. The present study obtained adult labeling data for natural productions of bilabial and alveolar pairs produced by 2-3-year-old monolingual, English-speaking children. Randomized stimuli were presented twice to 20 listeners resulting in 5,760 rated stimuli. Stimuli were categorized as short VOT ( 35 ms). The findings show that listeners demonstrated the greatest accuracy for bilabials (>99%) and alveolars (>92%) when the target matched the expected VOT duration (i.e., doe → short lag and toe → long lag). As...

Realisation of voicing by French-speaking CI children after long-term implant use: An acoustic study

ABSTRACTStudies of speech production in French-speaking cochlear-implanted (CI) children are very scarce. Yet, difficulties in speech production have been shown to impact the intelligibility of these children. The goal of this study is to understand the effect of long-term use of cochlear implant on speech production, and more precisely on the coordination of laryngeal-oral gestures in stop production. The participants were all monolingual French children: 13 6;6- to 10;7-year-old CI children and 20 age-matched normally hearing (NH) children. We compared /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/ and /g/ in word-initial consonant-vowel sequences, produced in isolation in two different tasks, and we studied the effects of CI use, vowel context, task and age factors (i.e. chronological age, age at implantation and duration of implant use). Statistical analyses show a difference in voicing production between groups for voiceless consonants (shorter Voice Onset Times for CI children), with significance reached only for /k/, but no difference for voiced consonants. Our study indicates that in the long run, use of CI seems to have limited effects on the acquisition of oro-laryngeal coordination needed to produce voicing, except for specific difficulties located on velars. In a follow-up study, further acoustic analyses on vowel and fricative production by the same children reveal more difficulties, which suggest that cochlear implantation impacts frequency-based features (second formant of vowels and spectral moments of fricatives) more than durational cues (voicing).

Interaction between aspiration and tonal pitch in Weihai Chinese

This paper considers the questions of whether, how, and by what mechanism the aspiration of voiceless stops in the syllable onset affects the pitch (F0) of lexical tone in a tone language. The literature on this topic is at odds with itself. Lai et al. [“The raising effect of aspirated prevocalic consonants on F0 in Taiwanese,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (2009)] review the history of conflicting results, with some studies reporting F0 lowering after aspirated stops, and some reporting F0 raising. Here is provided another battery of findings from another tonal dialect, Weihai Chinese. Using data from seven monodialectal female speakers, no effect of aspiration is found on tonal F0 following bilabial or alveolar stops, but a strong significant lowering effect was observed following the velar aspirated stops. A second issue addressed here has had almost nothing published about it, viz., what is the converse effect of the lexical tone pitch upon the aspiration time (VOT) of the onset stops. It was found that, in general, high-beginning tones correlated with shorter voice onset times in all stop onsets.

Adaptation to accent is proportionate to the prevalence of accented speech

Listeners rapidly reweight the mapping of acoustic cues to speech categories in response to abrupt introductions of accented speech. For instance, when encountering an accent that reverses the typical correlation of acoustic cues to speech category membership, listeners rapidly down-weight reliance on secondary cues [Idemaru and Holt, 2011; 2014; Liu and Holt 2015]. Here, we examined the impact of experiencing mixtures of typical and accented speech in evoking cue down-weighting to test how much information the system requires to adapt. Listeners recognized words as beer versus pier across 41 blocks of 20 trials. In the first block, participants exclusively encountered tokens with the canonical English relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and voice onset time (VOT); low F0 frequencies were associated with short VOT durations whereas high F0 frequencies were associated with long VOT durations. In subsequent blocks, the ratio of canonical to accented tokens (for which the F0/VOT correlation was reversed) was changed by 5% per block until participants experienced exclusively accented speech. Canonical tokens were then reintroduced incrementally, until participants exclusively heard canonical speech. Reliance on F0 for word recognition linearly decreased as the proportion of accented speech increased. Implications for models of the speech perception system are discussed.

Perception Abilities of L1 Cypriot Greek Listeners - Types of Errors Involving Plosive Consonants in L2 English.

This paper investigates the difficulties adult second language (L2) users of English encounter with plosive consonants in the L2. It presents the results of a task examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) linguistic background. The task focused on the types of errors involving plosive consonants indicating that performance was significantly better in the voiceless plosive category. Participants were able to perceive voiced plosives but they treated such instances as a /nasal+voiced plosive/ sequence. Therefore, the question raised concerns different phonological contrasts realised through similar phonetic cues. The patterns observed suggested that this gap between phonetic cues and phonological contrast might explain why CG users have difficulties perceiving voiced English plosives. In this context, voice onset time (VOT) differences between the L1 and L2 are of crucial importance. In English, voiced plosives are characterised by short lag VOT while their voiceless counterparts fall within the long lag VOT continuum. The same phonetic contrast is used in CG to differentiate between single and geminate voiceless plosives. The results are discussed in relation to the frameworks of second language phonology and speech perception suggesting that the difficulties faced by the L2 listeners support the operation of a phonetic-phonological challenge.

Phonological status, not voice onset time, determines the acoustic realization of onset f0 as a secondary voicing cue in Spanish and English

The covariation of onset f0 with voice onset time (VOT) was examined across and within phonological voicing categories in two languages, English and Spanish. The results showed a significant co-dependency between onset f0 and VOT across phonological voicing categories but not within categories, in both languages. Thus, English short lag and long lag VOT stops, which contrast phonologically, were found to differ significantly in onset f0. Similarly, Spanish short lag and lead VOT tokens are phonologically contrastive and also differed significantly in terms of onset f0. In contrast, English short lag and lead VOT stops, which are sub-phonemic variants of the same phonological category, did not differ in terms of onset f0. These results highlight the importance of phonological factor in determining the pattern of covariation between VOT and onset f0.

Functional asymmetry and effective connectivity of the auditory system during speech perception is modulated by the place of articulation of the consonant- A 7T fMRI study.

To differentiate between stop-consonants, the auditory system has to detect subtle place of articulation (PoA) and voice-onset time (VOT) differences between stop-consonants. How this differential processing is represented on the cortical level remains unclear. The present functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study takes advantage of the superior spatial resolution and high sensitivity of ultra-high-field 7 T MRI. Subjects were attentively listening to consonant–vowel (CV) syllables with an alveolar or bilabial stop-consonant and either a short or long VOT. The results showed an overall bilateral activation pattern in the posterior temporal lobe during the processing of the CV syllables. This was however modulated strongest by PoA such that syllables with an alveolar stop-consonant showed stronger left lateralized activation. In addition, analysis of underlying functional and effective connectivity revealed an inhibitory effect of the left planum temporale (PT) onto the right auditory cortex (AC) during the processing of alveolar CV syllables. Furthermore, the connectivity result indicated also a directed information flow from the right to the left AC, and further to the left PT for all syllables. These results indicate that auditory speech perception relies on an interplay between the left and right ACs, with the left PT as modulator. Furthermore, the degree of functional asymmetry is determined by the acoustic properties of the CV syllables.

Listeners’ sensitivity to talker differences in voice-onset-time: Phonetic boundaries and internal category structure

Recent findings indicate that listeners are sensitive to talker differences in phonetic properties of speech, including voice-onset-time (VOT) in word-initial stop consonants. The current work extends our earlier research by examining the degree to which listeners adjust the initial mapping from acoustic signal to segmental representation on a talker-specific basis. Two groups of listeners are exposed to a talker producing “cane.” Word-initial VOTs are manipulated such that one group hears “cane” produced with short VOTs and the other group hears “cane” produced with relatively longer VOTs. Following training, listeners’ voicing boundary for a /g/-/k/ continuum is tested. In addition, listeners are tested on phonetic category space by rating members of the continuum for typicality as /k/. If listeners adjust segmental mapping to accommodate talker differences in phonetic properties of speech, then we expect to observe a displacement in the voicing boundaries in line with earlier exposure. Moreover, if this adjustment entails a comprehensive reorganization of phonetic category space, then the /k/ exemplars rated most prototypical will also be displaced for the two listener groups. These data will be discussed in terms of potential constraints on talker-specificity in spoken language processing.

Voice onset time is necessary but not always sufficient to describe acquisition of voiced stops: The cases of Greek and Japanese

The age at which children master adult-like voiced stops can generally be predicted by voice onset time (VOT): stops with optional short lag are early, those with obligatory lead are late. However, Japanese voiced stops are late despite having a short lag variant, whereas Greek voiced stops are early despite having consistent voicing lead. This cross-sectional study examines the acoustics of word-initial stops produced by English-, Japanese-, and Greek-speaking children aged 2–5, to investigate how these seemingly exceptional mastery patterns relate to use of other phonetic correlates. Productions were analyzed for VOT, f0 and spectral tilt (H1−H2) in Japanese and English, and for amplitude trajectory in Greek and Japanese. Japanese voiceless stops have intermediate lag VOT values, so other “secondary” cues are needed to differentiate them from the voiced short lag VOT variant. Greek voiced stops are optionally prenasalized, and the amplitude trajectory for the voice bar during closure suggests that younger children use a greater degree of nasal venting to create the aerodynamic conditions necessary for voicing lead. Taken together, the findings suggest that VOT must be supplemented by measurements of other language-specific acoustic properties to explain the mastery pattern of voiced stops in some languages.

Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language

How do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic–phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless ‘unaspirated’ stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature {−spread glottis}; Korean has a voiceless ‘aspirated’ stop produced with lengthened VOT in similar environments, enhancing the feature {+spread glottis}. Given this cross-linguistic difference, two competing hypotheses were tested. The phonological-superiority hypothesis predicts that Dutch and Korean listeners should utilize shortened and lengthened VOTs, respectively, as cues in artificial-language segmentation. The phonetic-superiority hypothesis predicts that both groups should take advantage of the phonetic richness of longer VOTs (i.e., their enhanced auditory–perceptual robustness). Dutch and Korean listeners learned the words of an artificial language better when word-initial stops had longer VOTs than when they had shorter VOTs. It appears that language-specific phonological knowledge can be overridden by phonetic richness in processing an unfamiliar language. Listeners nonetheless performed better when the stimuli were based on the speech of their native languages, suggesting that the use of richer phonetic information was modulated by listeners' familiarity with the stimuli.