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.

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.

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.