Effects of speaking style and semantic predictability on vowel production.

Listener-oriented accounts of phonetic enhancement propose that talkers produce enhanced vowels to increase clarity when their interlocutor might experience communicative difficulty, e.g., for non-native interlocutors or for an unpredictable word given the semantic context.

Dynamic acoustic vowel distances within and across dialects.

Vowels vary in their acoustic similarity across regional dialects of American English, such that some vowels are more similar to one another in some dialects than others. Acoustic vowel distance measures typically evaluate vowel similarity at a discrete time point, resulting in distance estimates that may not fully capture vowel similarity in formant trajectory dynamics. In the current study, language and accent distance measures, which evaluate acoustic distances between talkers over time, were applied to the evaluation of vowel category similarity within talkers.

Relative Contributions of Social, Contextual, and Lexical Factors in Speech Processing.

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.

More than just methods: Data and insights guide vowel acoustics research.

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

Phonetic convergence to Southern American English: Acoustics and perception.

Phonetic convergence is linguistically and socially selective. The current study examined the constraints on this selectivity in convergence to Southern American English by non-Southern Americans in a word shadowing task. Participants were asked either to repeat the words after the model talker, to repeat the words after the model talker from Louisville, KY, or to imitate the way the model talker from Louisville, KY, said the words, in a between-subject design.

Acoustic cues and linguistic experience as factors in regional dialect classification.

Listeners are able to classify talkers by regional dialect of their native language when provided with even short speech samples. However, the way in which American English listeners use segmental and prosodic information to make such decisions is largely unknown. This study used a free classification task to assess native American English listeners' ability to group together talkers from six major dialect regions of American English.

Variation in /u/ fronting in the American Midwest.

Previous research has suggested that a greater degree of social indexing of gender, race, and regional background is produced in linguistic contexts that promote phonetic reduction. The goal of the current study was to explore this hypothesis through an examination of the realization of an ongoing sound change in the American Midwest-/u/ fronting-as a function of four linguistic factors that contribute to phonetic reduction: lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density, discourse mention, and speaking style. The results revealed minimal effects of the linguistic factors on the degree of /u/ fronting among talkers with greater overall advancement in the /u/ fronting change-in-progress, suggesting that the process of /u/ fronting is nearing completion among some American Midwesterners.

Subphonemic Variation and Lexical Processing: Social and Stylistic Factors.

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.

Regional dialect perception across the lifespan: Identification and discrimination.

Although adult listeners can often identify a talker's region of origin based on his or her speech, young children typically fail in dialect perception tasks, and little is known about the development of regional dialect representations from childhood into adulthood. This study explored listeners' understanding of the indexical importance of American English regional dialects across the lifespan. Listeners between 4 and 79 years old in the Midwestern United States heard talkers from the Midland, Northern, Southern, and New England regions in two regional dialect perception tasks: identification and discrimination.

The Development of Regional Dialect Locality Judgments and Language Attitudes Across the Life Span.

The development of language attitudes and perception of talker regional background was investigated across the life span (N = 240, age range = 4-75 years). Participants rated 12 talkers on dimensions of geographic locality, status, and solidarity. Children could classify some dialects by locality by age 6-7 years and showed adult-like patterns by age 8 years.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Advancing Methods for Analyzing Dialect Variation.

Documenting and analyzing dialect variation is traditionally the domain of dialectology and sociolinguistics. However, modern approaches to acoustic analysis of dialect variation have their roots in Peterson and Barney's [(1952). J.

Effects of Lexical Competition and Dialect Exposure on Phonological Priming.

A cross-modal lexical decision task was used to explore the effects of lexical competition and dialect exposure on phonological form priming. Relative to unrelated auditory primes, matching real word primes facilitated lexical decision for visual real word targets, whereas competing minimal pair primes inhibited lexical decision. These effects were robust across two English vowel pairs (mid-front and low-front) and for two listener groups (mono-dialectal and multi-dialectal).

Variation in the strength of lexical encoding across dialects.

Lexical processing is slower and less accurate for unfamiliar dialects than familiar dialects. The goal of the current study was to test the hypothesis that dialect differences in lexical processing reflect differences in lexical encoding strength across dialects. Lexical encoding (i.

Automatic measurement of vowel duration via structured prediction.

A key barrier to making phonetic studies scalable and replicable is the need to rely on subjective, manual annotation. To help meet this challenge, a machine learning algorithm was developed for automatic measurement of a widely used phonetic measure: vowel duration. Manually-annotated data were used to train a model that takes as input an arbitrary length segment of the acoustic signal containing a single vowel that is preceded and followed by consonants and outputs the duration of the vowel.

Dialect Interference in Lexical Processing: Effects of Familiarity and Social Stereotypes.

Background/aims: The current study explored the roles of dialect familiarityand social stereotypes in dialect interference effects in a speeded lexical classification task.

Methods: Listeners classified the words bad and bed or had and head produced by local Midland and non-local Northern talkers and the words sod and side or rod and ride produced by non-local, non-stereotyped Northern and nonlocal, stereotyped Southern talkers in single- and mixed-talker blocks.

Results: Lexical classification was better for the local dialect than for the non-local dialects, and for the stereotyped non-local dialect than for the non-stereotyped non-local dialect.

Effects of local lexical competition and regional dialect on vowel production.

Global measures of lexical competition, such as lexical neighborhood density, assume that all phonological contrasts contribute equally to competition. However, effects of local phonetic similarity have also been observed in speech production processes, suggesting that some contrasts may lead to greater competition than others. In the current study, the effect of local lexical competition on vowel production was examined across two dialects of American English that differ in the phonetic similarity of the low-front and low-back vowel pairs.

Children's perception of dialect variation.

A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match speakers to (un)familiar cultural items. Each child was tested with two of the following: the child's Home dialect, a Regional variant of that dialect, and a Second-Language variant.

Perception of talker age by young adults with high-functioning autism.

People with high-functioning Autism (HFA) can accurately identify social categories from speech, but they have more difficulty connecting linguistic variation in the speech signal to social stereotypes associated with those categories. In the current study, the perception and evaluation of talker age by young adults with HFA was examined. The participants with HFA performed similarly to a typically-developing comparison group in age classification and estimation tasks.

Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English.

While cross-dialect prosodic variation has been well established for many languages, most variationist research on regional dialects of American English has focused on the vowel system. The current study was designed to explore prosodic variation in read speech in two regional varieties of American English: Southern and Midland. Prosodic dialect variation was analyzed in two domains: speaking rate and the phonetic expression of pitch movements associated with accented and phrase-final syllables.

Perception of dialect variation by young adults with high-functioning autism.

The linguistic profile of people with Autism spectrum disorders typically involves intact perceptual processing, accompanied by deficits in the social functions of language. In a series of three experiments, the impact of this profile on the perception of regional dialect was examined. Young adults with High-Functioning Autism exhibited similar performance to a typically developing comparison group in regional dialect classification and localness rating tasks, suggesting that they can use indexical information in speech to make judgments about the regional background of unfamiliar talkers.

A Perceptual Phonetic Similarity Space for Languages: Evidence from Five Native Language Listener Groups.

The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses.

Free classification of American English dialects by native and non-native listeners.

Most second language acquisition research focuses on linguistic structures, and less research has examined the acquisition of sociolinguistic patterns. The current study explored the perceptual classification of regional dialects of American English by native and non-native listeners using a free classification task. Results revealed similar classification strategies for the native and non-native listeners.

Effects of semantic predictability and regional dialect on vowel space reduction.

This study explored the interaction between semantic predictability and regional dialect variation in an analysis of speech produced by college-aged female talkers from the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects of American English. Previous research on the effects of semantic predictability has shown that vowels in high semantic predictability contexts are temporally and spectrally reduced compared to vowels in low semantic predictability contexts. In the current study, an analysis of vowel duration confirmed temporal reduction in the high predictability condition.