No abstract

Different pronunciation variants of the same word can facilitate lexical access, but they may be more or less effective primes depending on their phonological form, stylistic appropriateness, familiarity, and social prestige, suggesting that multiple phonological variants are encoded in the lexicon with varying strength. The current study investigated how subphonemic variation is encoded using a lexical decision task with cross-modal form priming. The results revealed that the magnitude of priming was mediated by stylistic and social properties of the auditory primes, including speaking style, talker dialect, and duration. These interactions provide evidence that phonetically reduced forms and forms that are not socially prestigious are not as robustly encoded in the lexicon as canonical forms and forms produced in prestigious varieties.

This exploratory study examined the simultaneous interactions and relative contributions of bottom-up social information (regional dialect, speaking style), top-down contextual information (semantic predictability), and the internal dynamics of the lexicon (neighborhood density, lexical frequency) to lexical access and word recognition. Cross-modal matching and intelligibility in noise tasks were conducted with a community sample of adults at a local science museum. Each task featured one condition in which keywords were presented in isolation and one condition in which they were presented within a multiword phrase. Lexical processing was slower and more accurate when keywords were presented in their phrasal context, and was both faster and more accurate for auditory stimuli produced in the local Midland dialect. In both tasks, interactions were observed among stimulus dialect, speaking style, semantic predictability, phonological neighborhood density, and lexical frequency. These interactions revealed that bottom-up social information and top-down contextual information contribute more to speech processing than the internal dynamics of the lexicon. Moreover, the relatively stronger bottom-up social effects were observed in both the isolated word and multiword phrase conditions, suggesting that social variation is central to speech processing, even in non-interactive laboratory tasks. At the same time, the specific interactions observed differed between the two experiments, reflecting task-specific demands related to processing time constraints and signal degradation.

A number of linguistic factors influence the phonetic realization of segments within a word, especially vowels within the word. These factors include lexical frequency, lexical neighborhood density, semantic predictability, and mention within a discourse. Sociolinguistic factors, such as speaking style and regional dialect, are also known to influence the phonetic realization of vowels. This study investigates the ways in which phonetic reduction caused by the linguistic factors and sociolinguistic variation from speaking style and talker dialect affect lexical processing. Participants are asked to identify single word tokens in noise that vary in frequency, density, predictability, discourse mention, speaking style, and talker dialect in a fully crossed design. We expect participants to identify words containing vowels with less phonetic reduction, a clear speaking style, and a familiar regional dialect with greater accuracy than words with more reduced vowels, a plain speaking style, or a less familiar dialect. The experimental design allows us to explore the individual contributions to word intelligibility of each of the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors independently and in complex interactions.

Previous acoustic analyses of the singleton-geminate contrast in Japanese have focused primarily on read speech. The present study instead analyzed the lengths of singleton and geminate productions of word-medial fricatives and voiceless stops in spontaneous monologues from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (Maekawa, 2003). The results of a linear mixed effects regression model mirrored previous findings in read speech that the geminate effect (the durational difference between geminate and singletons) of stops is significantly larger than that of fricatives. This study also found a large range of variability in the geminate effect size between talkers. The size of the geminate effect between fricatives and voiceless stops was found to be slightly correlated, suggesting that they might be related to other rate-associated production differences between individuals. This suggestion was evaluated by exploring duration differences associated with talker age and gender. While there was no relationship between age and duration, males produced shorter durations than females for both fricatives and stops. However, the size of the geminate effect was not related to the gender of the speaker. The cause of these individual differences may be related to sound perception. Future research will investigate the cause of these individual differences in geminate effect size.

No abstract

While older Japanese speakers from the Kansai region produce voiced-voiceless stop contrasts with a true voicing distinction, older speakers from the northern Tohoku region produce the same stop contrasts with a short- versus long-lag VOT distinction, similar to the voicing contrast of English stops. However, Japanese speakers of younger generations from both of these dialect regions have been observed to produce the voiced-voiceless stop contrast in much the same way to each other, and they also seem to be using VOT as a less informative cue for stop distinction than speakers of previous generations (Takada, 2011). This study investigates the status of this sound change in the speech from the Tokyo dialect region, generally considered the standard for the modern language. Using speech data available from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, we analyze stops produced by Tokyo speakers to determine differences in voicing contrast conditioned by speaker age and gender. We expect the stop contrast of older speakers to pattern differently than that of younger speakers, and we expect to see evidence for a sound change in progress similar to that observed in the other dialects. We also explore other acoustic correlates that may potentially contribute to Japanese stop contrasts as the sound change progresses.

Phonetic reduction due to lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density, and discourse mention, as well as speaking style and social-indexical variation can constrain listeners’ ability to identify spoken single word tokens. In phrasal contexts, however, semantic predictability facilitates word recognition. The aim of the current study was to investigate how semantic predictability influences the intelligibility of words that vary in their lexical, stylistic, and socio-indexical properties. Listeners were presented with auditory English phrases extracted from read passages and were asked to identify each phrase. Phrases were mixed with speech-shaped noise and each contained a target word of interest. Linguistic and social properties of the target words were used to predict listeners’ target word recognition accuracy. These factors included semantic predictability, lexical frequency, neighborhood density, speaking style, discourse mention within the passage, talker gender, and talker dialect. The results revealed that greater semantic predictability increased word recognition accuracy, but only for the most phonetically reduced words (e.g., high-frequency words, second mentions, and words in a plain style). These results suggest that the semantic predictability benefit is enhanced primarily for words that might otherwise be difficult to recognize when removed from their semantic context.