The acoustic properties of foreigner-directed speech are surprisingly understudied, and many existing studies evoke imagined interlocutors to elicit foreigner-directed speech. This study provides an acoustic comparison of foreignerdirected and native-directed speech in real and imaginary conditions. Ten native U.S. English speakers described the path between landmarks on a map to two confederate listeners (one native English speaker and one native Mandarin speaker) and to two imagined listeners (described as a native U.S. English speaker and a non-native speaker). Vowel duration, rate of speech, and vowel space size were examined across native/foreigner and real/imagined conditions. Stressed vowels were longer, rate of speech was slower, and vowel space distances were expanded in the foreigner-directed and imaginary conditions than in the native-directed and real ones. Speakers made acoustic-phonetic adjustments in foreignerdirected speech that are consistent with those seen in listener-directed clear speech, and these additional adjustments were made for both native and foreign listeners when the listener was imagined rather than real.
The role of secondary cues in voicing categorization was investigated in three listener groups: Monolingual English (n = 20) and Spanish speakers (n = 20), and Spanish speakers with significant English experience (n = 16). Results showed that, in all three groups, participants used onset f0 in making voicing decisions only in the positive voice onset time (VOT) range (short lag and long lag tokens), while there was no effect of onset f0 on voicing categorization within the negative VOT range (voicing lead tokens) for any of the participant groups. These results support an auditory enhancement view of perceptual cue weighting: Onset f0 serves as a secondary cue to voicing only in the positive VOT range where it is not overshadowed by the presence of pre-voicing. Moreover, results showed that Spanish learners of English gave a significantly greater weight to onset f0 in their voicing decisions than did listeners in either of the other two groups. This result supports the view that learners may overweight secondary cues to distinguish between non-native categories that are assimilated to the same native category on the basis of a primary cue.
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