This study reports equivalence in recognition for variable productions of spoken words that differ greatly in frequency. General American (GA) listeners participated in either a semantic priming or a false-memory task, each with three talkers with different accents: GA, New York City (NYC), and Southern Standard British English (BE). GA/BE induced strong semantic priming and low false recall rates. NYC induced no semantic priming but high false recall rates. These results challenge current theory and illuminate encoding-based differences sensitive to phonetically-cued talker variation. The findings highlight the central role of phonetic variation in the spoken word recognition process.

Voiced obstruents have inherent susceptibility for devoicing due to the Aerodynamic Voicing Constraints (AVC), and the susceptibility is higher for geminate obstruents than singletons. As a way to investigate how Japanese speakers realize the contrast between the [ + /-voice] contrast in obstruents, we examined oral and nasal airflow patterns during intervocalic voiced and voiceless stops, in singletons and geminates. The results showed asymmetry between single and geminate stops in realization of the stop voicing contrast. Airflow pattern clearly differentiates voiced vs. voiceless contrast in singletons, but the airflow patterns are similar in geminates. Acoustic signals also shows the same asymmetry between the singletons and geminates. The observed convergence—clear voicing contrast in singletons vs. the lack of the contrast in geminates both in air flow and acoustic signals indicate neutralization of the voiced geminates into voiceless ones. Our results support the idea of phonetic bases in phonological patterning of voicing neutralization in Japanese geminate stops.

The effects of phoneme frequency on stop place perception were examined. In English, [t] is more frequently observed than [k] while the opposite is true in Japanese. If the sound frequency affects the phoneme perception, English listeners would identify more of the ambiguous [t]-[k] stimuli as “t” than do Japanese listeners. In this study, a 4IAX discrimination experiment and a phoneme boundary decision experiment were conducted with English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners to test this hypothesis. The stimuli of the two experiments were created by the Klatt synthesizer. [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were recorded by a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker, respectively. Then, [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were synthesized based on the parameter values obtained from the measurements of the recorded tokens. They were used as the end-point tokens of a nine-step continuum. The rest of the tokens were created by manipulating frequency parameters of the synthesizer. Four sets of [k]-[t] continua were created (two languages: English and Japanese, and two vowel conditions: [a] and [o]). A preliminary analysis of a subset of data demonstrated that the more frequent sound in each language occupied a larger perceptual region of the [a] vowel continua.

A rare case of papillary cystadenocarcinoma of the sublingual gland was immunohistochemically studied. Regional lymph node metastasis was present at the time of diagnosis. Histologically, the tumor showed an invasive, cystic growth pattern and had a conspicuous papillary component. The predominant cell type of the tumor was a combination of tall columnar and large cuboidal cells. Immunohistochemical analysis indicated higher labelling indices of CD34 (31.9%) and Ki67 (40.1%) as compared with adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC). Cyclooxygenase-2 expression was similar to that of ACC. These findings suggested a characteristic high-grade malignancy that required close follow-up.

No abstract

Recently many researchers modeled sound change as the result of phonologization [Hyman (1976)], a process whereby coarticulatory perturbation of a speech sound becomes intended properties of the sound. Although phonologization is a useful concept, diagnostic criteria have yet to be proposed. By using /u/-fronting in alveolar context in American English as a case study, this paper demonstrates how production data of various speech rates may be used to differentiate phonologized speech variations from mechanically caused variations. English speakers produced /CuC/ forms where the place of both Cs was either alveolar (text context) or other (control context), in fast, medium, and slow speech rates. [Lindblom (1963)] demonstrated that the magnitude of coarticulatory influence on the vowel reduces as the vowel’s duration increases. Thus, if the fronting of the vowel in alveolar context persists regardless of its duration, then this would constitute as evidence for phonologization. The results from a study with 30 speakers show that the vowels had significantly higher mean F2 values in alveolar contexts than in bilabial or zero contexts even in slow speech rate, suggesting that speakers have distinct production goals for /u/s in different contexts, or /u/-fronting has been phonologized.

Given the massive variation in natural speech, how listeners recognize words is a central issue for linguistic theory. Listener sensitivity to acoustic fluctuations in speech has provided us with one piece of the puzzle: detailed, specific representations. We provide another piece: differential activation of these representations. We conducted a semantic priming with General American listeners of positively viewed non-rhotic British English accents and negatively viewed non-rhotic New York City accents (slender'THIN; slend-UH(BE)'THIN; slend-UH(NYC)'THIN). Controlling participant experience and self-reported familiarity with both accents, only the words produced in a British accent primed semantically related targets. There is no a priori reason to expect this pattern, as the phonological variant and lexical items are controlled. We suggest that two variants equally experienced in number (raw frequency) are perceived differentially because positive and negative attitudes influence the activation lexical representations. Additionally, by examining particular participant groups from non-rhotic regions, we show an oscillation between effects of raw frequency and listener attitudes. This work (1) provides a broader understanding of factors influencing activation, (2) increases our understanding of how frequency effects are modulated by other factors (subjective listener attitudes), and (3) illuminates the interactive nature of linguistic and social factors in speech perception.

Previous work examined listeners’ recognition of a vowel in a series of [dVt] and [bVp] syllables varying perceptually from /CiC/ to /CuC/ in four different conditions (without precursor phrase, with precursor phrase, and in fast, medium, and slow speech), and found that ambiguous vowel stimuli were more often heard as /u/ in the [dt] context as opposed to the [bp] context (compensation for coarticulation). This paper reports the results of further analysis of the data and shows that although listeners varied in their /i/-/u/ category boundaries, their perceptual responses were systematic so that a group of listeners who had the category boundary closer to the /i/-end than the rest of the listeners in the “no-precursor” condition consistently had it this way in other conditions as well. This study also investigated the listeners’ response in vowel repetition task, where the listeners were asked to listen to the same [CVC] stimuli as used in the vowel recognition task and to repeat only the vowel. Results of this part of the study will be presented and the implications for a listener-based theory of sound change will be discussed.