Neighborhood-conditioned patterns in phonetic detail: Relating coarticulation and hyperarticulation

Scarborough, Rebecca

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2013.09.004

Cited by 55 publications

(60 citation statements)

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“…Phonological neighborhood density is a measure of the number of phonologically similar words ('neighbors') there are for a given word (Luce et al 1990). Words with more neighbors, i.e., those from dense phonological neighborhoods, exhibit more hyperarticulated vowel spaces (Wright 2003;Munson and Solomon 2004), as well as a greater degree of nasal and vowel-tovowel coarticulation (Scarborough 2013), than words from sparser neighborhoods.…”

Section: Lexical Factors and Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexically conditioned phonetic variation in motherese: age-of-acquisition and other word-specific factors in infant- and adult-directed speech

Zellou

Scarborough

2015

Laboratory Phonology

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Words produced to infants exhibit phonetic modifications relative to speech to adult interlocutors, such as longer, more canonical segments and prosodic enhancement. Meanwhile, within speech directed towards adults, phonetic variation is conditioned by word properties: lower word frequency and higher phonological neighborhood density (ND) correlate with increased hyperarticulation and degree of coarticulation. Both of these types of findings have interpretations that recruit listener-directed motivations, suggesting that talkers modify their speech in an effort to enhance the perceptibility of the speech signal. In that vein, the present study examines lexically-conditioned variation in infant-directed speech. Specifically, we predict that the adult-reported age at which a word was learned -lexical age-of-acquisition (AoA) -conditions phonetic variation in infant-directed speech. This prediction is indeed borne out in spontaneous infant-directed speech: later-acquired words are produced with more hyperarticulated vowels and a greater degree of nasal coarticulation. Meanwhile, ND predicts phonetic variation in data from spontaneous adultdirected speech, while AoA does not independently influence production. The patterns of findings in the current study support the stance that evaluation of the need for clarity is tuned to the listener. Lexical difficulty is evaluated by AoA in infant-directed speech, while ND is most relevant in adult-directed speech.

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Section: Lexical Factors and Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexically conditioned phonetic variation in motherese: age-of-acquisition and other word-specific factors in infant- and adult-directed speech

Zellou

Scarborough

2015

Laboratory Phonology

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“…Pardo et al (2013) proposed that because low-frequency, high-density words require more effort to resolve their phonetic details, more information would be available for convergence. Pardo et al also proposed that because talkers tend to hyperarticulate the vowels of words that are harder to identify-which has been found to be particularly true for words with high neighborhood densities (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2013)-the greater distinctiveness of the articulatory information could itself lead to greater phonetic convergence. As such, Pardo et al (2013) predicted that the shadowed utterances of low-frequency, highneighborhood-density words would show more phonetic convergence than the shadowed utterances of high-frequency, low-neighborhood-density words.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…There is evidence that hyperarticulation may affect speech in consistent ways across talkers (i.e., less talker-specific). Lowfrequency words are typically found to be articulated more slowly (e.g., Wright 1979), high-density words are typically produced with greater coarticulation (e.g., Scarborough, 2003Scarborough, , 2013, and both low-frequency and high-density words are typically found to be articulated with more expanded vowels (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004). These patterns of hyperarticulation are thought to make productions of difficult words more distinct and identifiable (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Lowfrequency words are typically found to be articulated more slowly (e.g., Wright 1979), high-density words are typically produced with greater coarticulation (e.g., Scarborough, 2003Scarborough, , 2013, and both low-frequency and high-density words are typically found to be articulated with more expanded vowels (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004). These patterns of hyperarticulation are thought to make productions of difficult words more distinct and identifiable (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2013). However, these lexically dependent patterns of articulation appear to transcend talker idiolect and have been exhibited by diverse groups of talkers across multiple studies (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2003Scarborough, , 2013Wright, 1979).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…These patterns of hyperarticulation are thought to make productions of difficult words more distinct and identifiable (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2013). However, these lexically dependent patterns of articulation appear to transcend talker idiolect and have been exhibited by diverse groups of talkers across multiple studies (e.g., Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2003Scarborough, , 2013Wright, 1979). Thus, all productions of low-frequency and high-density words may be influenced in systematic ways by hyperarticulation similarly across talkers.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Visibility of speech articulation enhances auditory phonetic convergence

Dias

Rosenblum

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Talkers automatically imitate aspects of perceived speech, a phenomenon known as phonetic convergence. Talkers have previously been found to converge to auditory and visual speech information. Furthermore, talkers converge more to the speech of a conversational partner who is seen and heard, relative to one who is just heard (Dias & Rosenblum Perception, 40, 1457-1466, 2011. A question raised by this finding is what visual information facilitates the enhancement effect. In the following experiments, we investigated the possible contributions of visible speech articulation to visual enhancement of phonetic convergence within the noninteractive context of a shadowing task. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of the visibility of a talker on phonetic convergence when shadowing auditory speech either in the clear or in low-level auditory noise. The results suggest that visual speech can compensate for convergence that is reduced by auditory noise masking. Experiment 2 further established the visibility of articulatory mouth movements as being important to the visual enhancement of phonetic convergence. Furthermore, the word frequency and phonological neighborhood density characteristics of the words shadowed were found to significantly predict phonetic convergence in both experiments. Consistent with previous findings (e.g., Goldinger Psychological Review, 105, 251-279, 1998), phonetic convergence was greater when shadowing low-frequency words. Convergence was also found to be greater for low-density words, contrasting with previous predictions of the effect of phonological neighborhood density on auditory phonetic convergence (e.g., Pardo, Jordan, Mallari, Scanlon, & Lewandowski Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 183-195, 2013). Implications of the results for a gestural account of phonetic convergence are discussed.

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Phonological neighborhood competition affects spoken word production irrespective of sentential context

Fox

Reilly

Blumstein

2015

Journal of Memory and Language

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Two experiments examined the influence of phonologically similar neighbors on articulation of words’ initial stop consonants in order to investigate the conditions under which lexically-conditioned phonetic variation arises. In Experiment 1, participants produced words in isolation. Results showed that the voice-onset time (VOT) of a target’s initial voiceless stop was predicted by its overall neighborhood density, but not by its having a voicing minimal pair. In Experiment 2, participants read aloud the same targets after semantically predictive sentence contexts and after neutral sentence contexts. Results showed that, although VOTs were shorter in words produced after predictive contexts, the neighborhood density effect on VOT production persisted irrespective of context. These findings suggest that global competition from a word’s neighborhood affects spoken word production independently of contextual modulation and support models in which activation cascades automatically and obligatorily among all of a selected target word’s phonological neighbors during acoustic-phonetic encoding.

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Neighborhood-conditioned patterns in phonetic detail: Relating coarticulation and hyperarticulation

Cited by 55 publications

References 63 publications

Lexically conditioned phonetic variation in motherese: age-of-acquisition and other word-specific factors in infant- and adult-directed speech

Lexically conditioned phonetic variation in motherese: age-of-acquisition and other word-specific factors in infant- and adult-directed speech

Visibility of speech articulation enhances auditory phonetic convergence

Phonological neighborhood competition affects spoken word production irrespective of sentential context

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