Language-specificity in early cortical responses to speech sounds

![CDATA[The continuity of speech articulation ensures that in all languages, spoken sounds influence one another. Thus there are potentially cues to a sound’s identity in the realisation of surrounding sounds. Listeners make use of such coarticulatory cues – but not always. It has long been known (Harris, Lang. Sp., 1958) that English-speakers use this coarticulation to identify [f] but not [s]. The reason is that place of articulation cues can distinguish [f] from its very close perceptual competitor [θ] (deaf/death), while [s] has no such perceptual competitor and hence less need of such disambiguation. In languages with [f] but no [θ] (e.g., Dutch, Polish), listeners do not use coarticulation to identify [f], whereas listeners do use coarticulation to identify [s] where [s] has close competitors (Polish; Wagner et al., JASA, 2006). The patterning of coarticulation cue use is thus language-specific.]]